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All together now

Residents of Emerson Commons have stayed connected through the pandemic. Photo: Eze Amos

Imagine, for a moment, that the forced sense of isolation, loneliness, and stir-craziness of the past year didn’t happen. That, although you may still have to wear a mask to the grocery store, be careful around the elderly, and work from home, you could pop outside and share lunch with others. A playdate for the kids, in this idyllic world, is only a few feet away. Your friends are only one or two homes from you and, with a text, they could join you outside for a chat in five minutes. No need for perpetual Zoom hangouts and Thanksgiving alone in front of the TV.

The secret has been under our noses this whole time: co-housing. And at Emerson Commons, that’s exactly what the past year has looked like.

Emerson Commons, composed of 26 colorful, solar-paneled homes on a grassy plot in Crozet, is one of a handful of intentional living communities in the Charlottesville area. Residents of such communities share decision-making duties, common spaces, and meals. Although many people still refer to them as communes, most modern co-housing communities don’t reflect the free-loving, basket-weaving hippie stereotypes that defined the commune movement during the 1970s.

“A lot of times people hear co-housing and think ‘commune,’” says James Gammon, a resident of Emerson Commons. “I like to tell people that it’s legally a condo association.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic has driven people around the world indoors—increasing isolation and preventing family and friends from gathering together—interest in intentional living communities has increased. Weary of social distancing, it seems, many are longing for a deeper sense of connection with their neighbors.

Reflecting on the pandemic, Gammon tries to empathize with those, this author included, who are suffering from varying levels of cabin fever. “I’m trying to imagine what that would be like, if we lived in our old house,” he says. “I think it would have been a crazy lonely year.”

Common purpose

Co-housing has existed in the United States since at least the 1700s—think of the Christian Shakers, famous for their pacifism, celibacy, and artisanal furniture. Modern co-housing began in the 1940s with the establishment of the Inter-Community Exchange in Ohio, and co-housing and communes gained popularity, and sometimes notoriety, in the counterculture heyday of the 1960s—the modern organizations inherited the Shakers’ anti-war zeal, but passed on the celibacy part. Locally, Twin Oaks in Louisa County was established in 1967 and still follows the almost tribal shared labor model of those early days. (Twin Oaks declined to participate in this story, citing concerns surrounding coronavirus.)

But intentional living communities saw another, different sort of boom in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. According to the Foundation for Intentional Community, listings in the group’s directory doubled between 2010 and 2016. Some of Charlottesville’s more recent intentional communities were founded in that time, including Emerson Commons. Emerson Commons residents aren’t living in ’60s-style yurts or bead-spangled tents—families at Emerson rent or buy a house, sometimes for as much as $400,000, when they join.

Gammon joined Emerson in 2015 and moved into the community in 2019. Gammon and his wife, Rebecca, were drawn to the idea after experiencing a sense of alienation and a lack of community following the birth of their son.

“We were the first couple in our group of friends to have a kid,” Gammon says. “Oh gosh, that was an isolating year. You don’t go out or do things that your friends do anymore.”

Gammon’s wife stumbled across co-housing through a Facebook moms’ group. The young couple decided “that day,” they say, to visit Shadowlake Village, another co-housing community near Blacksburg. They were hooked.

“All the kids were having a Fourth of July parade for the adults and then our son crawled for the first time,” he says. “It seemed like a good omen or something. …It just instantly sounded like, ‘Why didn’t I know this was a thing for my whole life?’”

Five years later, they’re surrounded by friends and support, while many others have experienced a year of unprecedented isolation. 

Emerson Commons residents have stayed closer than most of us. Children have playdates outside, and regular online game sessions occur—Among Us is a favorite. A few people have recently started a weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign. When one community member contracted COVID-19, neighbors pitched in to bring chicken soup and walk the neighbor’s dog. They’ve had to adapt to social distancing inside their community, especially because some work in health care, but Emerson has been an almost alternate pandemic world where complete isolation from friends and family isn’t necessary. And others are taking notice. The community has seen an uptick in inquiries from potential new members during the pandemic.

“It’s so easy to take for granted, once you live here,” Gammon says. “It’s hard to talk about the things that aren’t problems anymore.”

Communing with nature

Dave Redding, one of the founders of EcoVillage, was struck for the first time by the intentional-living philosophy while he and his wife were Peace Corps volunteers in Korea. Like Gammon, conventional housing didn’t appeal to Redding. Social interaction in your average neighborhood, he says, mostly involves watching people from your window.

“In traditional communities, you’re isolated. You may or may not know your neighbors,” Redding says. “We have to build community or else we’re just sitting in our houses.”

Redding, a former electrician, contractor, and world traveler, founded EcoVillage, an intentional community, in 2013—but the neighborhood as fully envisioned doesn’t exist yet. The current building plan has room for up to 38 houses and a common house on six-and-a-half acres in Albemarle County. 

One of EcoVillage’s core aims is to lessen its environmental impact. Redding is working with UVA to design houses that produce net-zero waste and energy use. The property is designed to accommodate an ample amount of garden space, electric car charging, solar power, and sustainable stormwater management. Residents will share a small fleet of vehicles, but mostly get around on bicycles and an ELF, a head-turning hybrid of a tricycle and a car complete with solar panels, a covered cab, and a rechargeable battery (if you’re lucky, you might see Redding riding an ELF around town). And, although the community isn’t complete yet, residents have already been advocating for sustainability issues in the greater Charlottesville area. In October, EcoVillage co-created a petition advocating for more decisive language in the city’s Climate Action Plan.

Redding riding his ELF. Photo courtesy subject.
Redding riding his ELF. Photo courtesy subject.

Seven people, including Redding, currently live in EcoVillage, in the two houses on the property. But, even with a small number of people, he can feel the benefits of the co-housing community during the otherwise isolating experience of the pandemic. Members do Tai Chi classes and regularly eat lunch and dinner together outside.

Not everything is sunshine and roses, however. Financial donors, something Eco­Village needs to become a reality, have been few and far between during COVID-19. Final approval for building plans have been pushed back, and a set date has yet to be determined.

“I’m definitely looking forward to the end of COVID,” Redding says. Like Gammon, he expects interest in co-housing to increase even more after the pandemic subsides.

“We’re all feeling the strong effects of [the pandemic],” Redding says. “This is not the way that it was meant to be.”

Reaching out

Though all of these co-housers are building on their visions of a brighter future, J. Elliott Cisneros’ vision might be the most ambitious. Since 2018, he’s been working to get Araminta Village up and running. Araminta was Harriet Tubman’s given first name, which she changed as an adult for reasons that remain uncertain. Cisneros chose it to reflect his dream—a multi­racial, queer-friendly, multifaith community in Charlottesville.

Cisneros and his two daughters briefly lived in an intentional living community in Colorado, but he was disconcerted by the lack of racial diversity—like many communes, the neighborhood was overwhelmingly white. While he was living there, Cisneros says, one Black family arrived and left after only a month.

Cisneros moved to Charlottesville in a camper van after the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Since 2006, he’s run a nonprofit called The Sum, which offers to “assess one’s unconscious orientation to power and race, religion, dis/ability, sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity” through a written test and one-hour phone call, for $150. The Sum then offers a 45-hour Power of Difference Certification program to schools and businesses that might be concerned about their results. Cisneros has set up a Sum Study Center downtown, and also started planning Araminta Village.

J. Elliot Cisneros. Photo courtesy subject.

The problem with attracting people of color to co-housing, says Crystal Byrd Farmer, a board member of The Sum and a member of the BIPOC council for the Foundation for Intentional Community, stems from co-housing’s beginning. Founded in the U.S. primarily by white people, co-housing has been exclusionary since its beginning. And it’s a hard problem to solve for already-established intentional communities. Farmer recognizes that people of color often try these communities and then leave.

“Some communities think, “Why don’t people of color come? We’re so nice!” Farmer says. “But it’s so much deeper than that.”

Crystal Byrd Farmer. Photo courtesy subject.

Models of ownership, the steep cost to enter into modern co-housing arrangements, formations for conflict resolution and consensus, and even language in these communities are founded and based on values that often disregard people of color. Farmer has consulted with intentional communities on how to welcome people of color, but says that those institutions are often unwilling to change the structure of their values. She says Twin Oaks, for example, attempted to create a cap on the number of white people that could be community members.

“I thought that was a bad idea, because they were only looking at admission and not at the deeper structure,” Farmer says. “When I talk to communities I often say, ‘If you started majority white you probably will stay that way.’”

The FIC’s BIPOC counsel works to form inclusive communities for people of color. Araminta has events like the weekly Community Circles that ask individuals to examine their underlying attitudes about difference and society.

Nevertheless, Farmer, like the folks at Emerson Commons and EcoVillage, is hopeful about the future of intentional communities. The FIC has definitely seen an increase in interest, she says, and they’ve started online events for those curious about intentional living.

“It totally makes sense to me, why people would be drawn to this,” Cisneros says. Araminta Village has a long road ahead and needs things like development planning, which has stalled during the pandemic. But Cisneros keeps asking questions, keeps imagining. “It all goes back to that question,” he says: “‘What is community?’”

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Know your neighbors takes on a whole different meaning in cohousing

At Emerson Commons in Crozet, 26 homes will encircle a car-free community with parking on its outskirts and shared spaces including a common house, a community workshop, garden, playground, swimming pool and a network of nature trails. Courtesy rendering

How many cohousers can fit in an igloo?

When the snow falls in an intentional community like Peter Lazar’s, the whole neighborhood suits up in their warmest wardrobe and heads outside. It was last winter when the residents of Shadowlake Village in Blacksburg built a mammoth igloo and challenged themselves to see how many neighbors they could stuff inside.

“Spoiler alert,” says Lazar, a 12.5-year resident of the cohousing development about 150 miles outside of Charlottesville. “The answer is 30.”

Like a multitude of America’s top trends, this one started abroad. The first cohousing development was built in Denmark in 1972 for 27 families, and the concept has been gaining momentum in the United States ever since. A reported 165 communities have been established from Alaska to Maine, with four of them—including Shadowlake Village—right here in Virginia.

An additional 10 cohousing communities are under development in the state, with EcoVillage Charlottesville in the very early stages of incubation in our backyard—and Lazar is at the helm of a second one that’s also pretty close to home.

The 50-year-old cohouser, and president of the Cohousing Association of the United States, is using his experience at Shadowlake to model a six-acre neighborhood in Crozet called Emerson Commons, where 26 residences will encircle a car-free community with parking on its outskirts and shared spaces including a common house, a community workshop, garden, playground, swimming pool and a network of nature trails. Each home will have solar panels installed on its roof.

In this community, as well as all other cohousing establishments, homeowners have independent incomes and private lives, but neighbors come together to manage shared spaces and activities such as weekly meals, meetings and work days, where members are responsible for the upkeep of the community. Emerson Common’s legal structure is that of a condo association.

Cathey Polly serves up the broccoli-and-quinoa dish she prepared for the weekly shared meal at Emerson Commons. Photo by Eze Amos

Because there’s no management company and the neighbors manage the property themselves, members will pay a low monthly fee that covers non-management items such as snow and trash removal and maintenance on the common house.

It’s not the area’s first attempt at cohousing. The Charlottesville Cohousing Association tried to build a similar neighborhood in 1997, but abandoned the project in 2002. According to Lazar, a comparable project by Blue Ridge Cohousing—on the same plot of land as Emerson Commons—crashed with the stock market in 2009, though 19 of its 26 homes had presold.

While there’s a long list of reasons cohousers are now choosing to live a more community-based lifestyle, Lazar says one of the most attractive features of a place like Shadowlake Village or Emerson Commons is building personal relationships with folks of all ages—a practice that is often lost in today’s society.

“When my daughters were too little to build snow forts, I’d build them with the older kids,” he says. “They’d ring our doorbell and ask, ‘Can Peter come out to play?’”

Lazar and his wife, Molly, have 15- and 13-year-old daughters named Mia and Ava, who had never spent more than a night or two apart until the oldest went to London with her grandparents about four years ago.

“Knowing that her little sister would miss her, Mia emailed the adults in the neighborhood, and asked if any of them would hang out with Ava after school,” Lazar says, and about a dozen people who responded spent the days baking bread, teaching kung fu, reading poetry and building a fort in the woods with the little Lazar. “Both the adults and Ava loved it. It was a chance for adult neighbors—some who didn’t have kids of their own—to get to know Ava a little better and vice versa.”

And now, the Northern Virginia transplant says his daughters have friends at Shadowlake from ages 2 to 82.

“We wanted our kids to be able to grow up in a sort of ’70s- or ’80s-era neighborhood where they knew everyone and could roam freely with friends,” he adds. A few of the families who’ve paid their deposits and plan to move into Emerson Commons later this year share similar sentiments.

Cohousing

Cohousing is defined as an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space, where members have independent incomes and private lives, but neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and spaces.

As defined by the Cohousing Association
of the United States, most cohousing developments have common characteristics:

Relationships

• Neighbors commit to being part of a community for everyone’s mutual benefit.

• Design features and neighborhood size (typically 20 to 40 homes) promote frequent interaction and close relationships.

Participation

• Decision-making is participatory and often based on consensus.

• Self-management empowers residents, builds community and saves money.

Shared values

• Neighborhoods are designed for privacy as well as community.

• Communities typically adopt green approaches to living, and support residents in actualizing shared values.

Mary and Brian Combs, who live in downtown Crozet, have claimed one of three single-family detached homes (there are also duplexes, triplexes and other attached styles) at the cohousing community under development about three quarters of a mile away from their current residence.

“We’re both from very large families, but neither live here,” says Mary at a Tuesday evening community meal in January at the Emerson Commons clubhouse. Their toddler son, Harrison, bangs tiny, shiny pots and pans together at a miniature play kitchen while the smell of a broccoli-and-quinoa dish that’s being prepared a few rooms away permeates the air.

She adds, “It was just strange, especially when Harrison came along in 2015, to not have a big extended family to help raise him. Since we couldn’t move our families here, moving into a cohousing community was the next best thing.”

Though none of the homes in the neighborhood—except for the shared common house—are fully constructed yet, the Combs family is anticipating an August move-in date.

“[Harrison is] going to be the same age as about five or six other kids that are already members here, so he’s going to have all of these cousins, essentially, that he’s going to grow up with, which kind of mimics the experience my husband and I had growing up,” says Mary.

Her husband, Brian, admits to initial reservations about moving to the community, but says he’s learned that cohousing isn’t all community gardens and shared meals, as some people probably imagine.

“There’s a little bit of a code here,” he says. “If you’re not in your backyard or on the porch or something like that, it sort of means you want your space.”

At Emerson Commons, the backyards will face mountains and wooded areas, and Lazar says “privacy is more than half of what it’s all about.”

“I would say there’s actually more privacy here than at a new urbanist community where there are many houses close together,” Lazar adds.

Developer Peter Lazar (right) consults with prospective members at a Tuesday night community meal in the Emerson Commons clubhouse. Five homes in the 26-residence neighborhood are still up for grabs. Photo by Eze Amos

Mary and Brian Combs come from big families, but they’re both far away. The couple is looking forward to giving their son, Harrison, the same kind of experience at Emerson Commons. Photo by Eze Amos

About 15 adults and several children have come out for the weekly meal at the Emerson Commons clubhouse, where one member prepares an entrée and another brings a salad and a dessert. Prospective members are invited to share dinner, learn more about the inner workings of the community and get to know one another.

Aside from the local area, current members will be moving from D.C., Northern Virginia, Fredericksburg, Christiansburg, Boston and Mississippi.

A gaggle of young kids whiz up the common house’s interior staircase as a baby pecks on the piano next to it. Tonight’s chef, Cathey Polly, pokes her head into the room where Harrison, the mini chef, is cooking a tomato on his play stove, and sings, “Dinner is served!”

“Having little ones around is truly a plus for me,” says Polly, a 67-year-old who is also scheduled to move into her home at Emerson Commons by the end of the summer. All homes are set to be completed by March 2019.

The future resident says she always prepares a vegetarian dish when it’s her turn to cook the weekly meal to suit the diets of a majority of her eventual neighbors. She also says most of them prefer to live an eco-friendly lifestyle and some have promised to teach her the way around a community garden this year.

“I haven’t gardened in years, so I’m really looking forward to that,” she says. “It’s really exciting in my stage of life to be learning new things.”

Lynn Heath made a special dessert tonight for 9-year-old Ezra’s birthday. You can tell the cupcakes baked into ice cream cones are good because there’s icing smeared across the faces of several little ones in the dining room.

For Heath, who’s a year older than Polly, moving to Emerson Commons is about aging in a place where she’s not too timid to ask or do favors for her neighbors.

“It’s really nothing to do a favor,” says Heath, “but statistically, people have very few people that they feel they can ask a favor of. In the 1950s, they had one or two people they felt they could ask a favor of and now people are really down to zero.”

In a traditional neighborhood, Heath says someone who asks to borrow a stick of butter might feel required to then gift a loaf of banana bread in return. “We always have to make things equal, and I just think [in cohousing] some of that anxiety disappears.”

Not far from Crozet, another cohousing project is on the horizon in bucolic Nelson County—and this one’s just for seniors.

It’s called Buck Creek Village, situated on a hilltop that overlooks a valley in Faber, just four miles south of the Albemarle County border. Here, construction is scheduled to begin in April on 10 homes that will sit on two-acre lots.

The houses will be connected by a path that also leads to the community’s common house. Members will jointly own a 30-acre parcel of woods and open hillside.

Not surprisingly, a main proponent behind this project is Gordon Walker, who retired from his 29-year role as CEO of the Jefferson Area Board for Aging, better known as JABA, in 2013. Walker now serves as president of Buck Creek LLC, the developer of the community. He explains why some older members of the local community saw a need for this type of development aimed specifically at their age group: “The cost of assisted living in nursing homes is beyond the reach of most of us. Oftentimes, the baby boomers are looking for options their parents didn’t have. In our view, cohousing is one of those.”

In a 2017 Society of Certified Senior Advisers journal, Walker wrote that senior citizens are looking for innovation, freedom from isolation and assurances of personal safety in their quest to age in place. Buck Creek Village aims to address each of those facets.

“Nowadays, we’re seeing some really interesting technological advances being made that create means by which you can monitor people in their homes,” he says, and adds that those developing the village are looking into floor monitors that could notify a designated person if a resident were to fall, or temperature monitors that could send alerts if a member left his oven on or his refrigerator open.

Gordon Walker, who retired from his 29-year role as CEO of the Jefferson Area Board for Aging in 2013, serves as president of Buck Creek LLC. Courtesy photo

While homeowners are responsible for the design and construction of their own houses, each space will be arranged to meet livability standards for seniors, which means that homes won’t have stairs leading up to them and the master bedrooms and bathrooms will be located on the first floor if a resident chooses to build her abode with multiple levels.

Buck Creek is situated near the Blue Ridge Medical Center and three doctor’s offices, and it’s only about 40 minutes from UVA Health System. Walker says he’s investigating opportunities for telemedicine at the common house and if all goes as planned, physicians with the local medical center will also visit the community on a regular schedule.

Like at Emerson Commons and other cohousing developments, the residents of Buck Creek will share the responsibility of running the village—and resident jobs will range from making meals and shopping to taking care of the community’s chickens.

“Just because we’re older, we still have assets,” Walker says. “I would say everybody who’s moving in is healthy enough to somehow contribute to the well-being of their neighbors. We try to debunk the myth that anybody who’s old can’t contribute anymore.”

Aside from the “dynamite views,” Walker says other exciting features of the 50-acre community include a proposed music room in the common house, hiking trails and the possibility of a solar farm to make their own electricity.

For Walker, the three things most inspiring about moving to Buck Creek are “being with friends, better preparing for our future as we grow older and living in Nelson County.”

But take it from the president of the national Cohousing Association: It’s not for everyone.

The type of person who does really well in cohousing is someone who’s easy-going, gets along with others, is seeking a balance of community and privacy and values relationships over winning, according to Lazar.

“I see this a little bit differently than some part of our society, especially politics, where winning is the most important thing,” he says. “It’s about each other, and working together to solve things.”

Not cohousing

Two intentional communities are already established in Louisa, but don’t call them cohousing. While one—founded in 1967 with about 100 current members—is one of the largest and longest-enduring communes in North America, the other went fully operational just last fall.

Both are income-sharing and use an economic model to sustain themselves, which is a major difference between the original intentional community and cohousing.

At Twin Oaks, making and selling hammocks has been the primary business since the community’s inception in the late ’60s, but its tofu and other soy products have recently become popular. Among other ventures, the members also dabble in book indexing and farming organic open-pollinated and heirloom vegetable seeds. The entire community shares about 15 public computers and fewer than 20 vehicles.

Members of Living Energy Farm, founded by ex-Twin Oaker Alexis Zeigler, grow food for the community, and sell seeds wholesale for income. With a few recent departures, only the owner’s family and a few interns who come and go currently live on the farm. They’ve stuck it out through recent cold spells by using only solar heat they’ve created and harnessed themselves. Living Energy’s aim is to create a modern lifestyle off the grid without any fossil fuel.

Living Energy Farm

Operating since 2017

Number of residences: One house, with room for expansion

Size: 130 acres

Address: 1022 Bibb Store Rd., Louisa

 

Twin Oaks

Operating since 1967

Number of residences: 7 houses with 10-20 members each

Size: 465 acres

Address: 138 Twin Oaks Rd, Louisa

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Trying again: Cohousing ready to break ground

Seventeen of the 26 homes available at Emerson Commons have already been reserved. Here are some of the neighborhood’s future faces. Contributed by Peter Lazar

Every kitchen sink will face a window that looks out into the front yard in a new 26-home development in Crozet. Lounging comfortably around the living room of their clubhouse, Emerson Commons residents call this design “classic cohousing,” because it encourages interaction with neighbors.

Periphery parking lots that allow for a traffic-free and kid-friendly community, all mail addressed to a main clubhouse and weekly potlucks and playgroups are also intentional ways to bring residents together at the development that’s scheduled to break ground this summer.

But some community members say outsiders often misinterpret their intended lifestyles.

“It’s not a commune. It’s not something to be afraid of,” says Rebecca Gammon as her 2 1/2-year-old son makes his rounds to the adults in the room. “It’s an alternative way of living, but it’s not so different from what we’re used to.”

Cohousing has existed in the United States since the ’90s and is currently practiced in more than 160 places nationwide, with more than 100 additional communities underway. Residents own private homes but share common facilities, resources and management of their community.

Emerson Commons developer and president of the Cohousing Association of the United States, Peter Lazar calls this project central Virginia’s first cohousing community, and says 17 of 26 homes are already reserved.

It’s not the area’s first attempt at cohousing. The Charlottesville Cohousing Association tried to build a similar development in 1997, but abandoned the project in 2002. According to Lazar, a comparable project by Blue Ridge Cohousing (on the same plot of land as Emerson Commons) crashed with the stock market in 2009, though 19 of its 26 homes had presold.

There’s an in-ground heated pool and plans for a community garden, a creekside walking trail and an eco-friendly playground. Residents are currently considering uses for a number of outbuildings, and ideas include a woodshop, gym and music studio. They’ll share equipment, such as lawnmowers, canoes, a grill and “all types of things you don’t need all the time,” says James Gammon.

He mentions the flux of construction in Crozet and soaring home prices, but adds that four units at Emerson Commons have been designated affordable housing. Prices range from about $280,000 to $420,000, with affordable units around $240,000.

Homes in the community located off Three Notch’d Road near Starr Hill Brewery range from 1,095-square-foot condo units to detached single-family homes of up to 2,780 square feet.

Residents call its location the best of both worlds—bikeable to downtown Crozet, but secluded in a wooded area with a stream that runs through the property. They’ve already picked out a location for a tree house.

“It’s kind of hard to find today, the small town kind of feel,” says Laura Bates, a Washington, D.C., transplant who currently lives in the clubhouse with her husband and kids. “It really does blend together the nature and the convenience.”

Scott Guggenheimer and his partner, Anna Stockdale, lived in D.C.’s Takoma Village cohousing before moving to Emerson Commons. He says the pair value cohousing for more than just shared resources, community meals and lower environmental impact.

“We think—we hope—that a group of people dedicated to solving problems together and engaging in intentional dialogue are more likely to find creative solutions when things get messy. …I think most of us wish the world were more interconnected, and we see this as a good step.”

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Living room: Community housing makes a comeback in Crozet

In typical cohousing fashion, homes face a pedestrian area and cars are relegated to the neighborhood’s periphery. Courtesy of Peter Lazar

Choosing to live in cohousing may be a difficult decision for some, but for Charlottesville residents James and Rebecca Gammon, signing on to be future residents of Emerson Commons in Crozet was a no-brainer.

“It makes life easier for everybody,” Rebecca says. She and her husband are currently raising their 21-month-old son, Connor, in their Locust Grove home. The first set of houses at Emerson Commons—6.1 acres located on the edge of the growth area in Crozet—is scheduled to be ready for move-in by next June.

Though they’ve never lived in cohousing before, raising Connor in the right environment by way of “free-range parenting,” they say, was a major factor in choosing to pursue that lifestyle.

James and Rebecca Gammon, situated outside of Emerson Commons’ common house, look forward to raising their son, Connor, in cohousing.
James and Rebecca Gammon, situated outside of Emerson Commons’ common house, look forward to raising their son, Connor, in cohousing. Courtesy of Peter Lazar

He will be able to play safely outdoors with other neighborhood kids—in typical cohousing fashion, homes face a pedestrian area and cars are relegated to the development’s periphery. And their hope, say the Gammons, is that this lifestyle will preclude Connor from becoming obsessed with technology, like many kids are today.

“I’m really excited for our son to be able to grow up having friendships with different generations of people,” Rebecca says. Growing up in northern Virginia, she says she got the feeling adults weren’t interested in interacting with her and she only associated with her own peer group. But she’s learned from other parents who have raised children in cohousing that kids often learn to socialize with neighbors of every age.

She mentions Peter and Molly Lazar, who are developing Emerson Commons, which they bought in 2013 for $550,000. The Lazars currently live in Shadowlake Village Cohousing in Blacksburg, and Rebecca is impressed with the maturity of their middle school-aged daughters. The new development will be modeled after Shadowlake, says Peter Lazar, who is vice president of the Cohousing Association of the United States.

“If you know your neighbors, you feel safer,” he says. “We also want to be sustainable as much as we can in a cost-effective way.”

Four models of homes are available at Emerson Commons and each will have solar panels on the roof, with the potential for individual households to go net zero, using no energy from the grid. Lazar stresses that Emerson Commons is not a commune, but a collection of 26 financially independent households with a common house that already stands.

“Privacy is really important but there’s also community,”  he says.

In the city, the Charlottesville Cohousing Association gave up its dream of building a similar development in the early 2000s, after admitting they didn’t have the expertise to follow through with their plan and, according to Lazar, a comparable project by Blue Ridge Cohousing (on the same plot of land as Emerson Commons) crashed with the stock market in 2009, though 19 out of 26 of the homes had presold.

“It’s something that’s much needed in Charlottesville,” he says, adding that the style of living is common in other progressive cities—11 cohousing developments are situated within five miles of Boulder, Colorado. And because they’re using Shadowlake as a model, they won’t be starting from scratch, he says.

Nine families have already paid a $1,250 fee to become equity members at Emerson Commons, and they can purchase their homes in the spring. Home sizes range from 800-square-foot condos to 2,780- square-foot single-family houses, and costs go from $260,000 to $400,000, depending on the options and finish.

For the Gammons, the development offers the best of both worlds.

“We’re both introverts, actually,” James says about himself and his wife. “This is designed so you can have plenty of social time when you want it and plenty of privacy when you want it.” He adds,“You can live a totally normal, financially independent lifestyle. I just think of it like a normal neighborhood, physically arranged differently.”