Looking Forward to the Past

As families change, so will the look of new communities. Is this the suburb of the future? On Bainbridge Island, Washington, 30 families dwell in a five-acre pedestrian village where doors are seldom locked, townspeople share cooking duties and even the children have their own rule-making committee. Based on an idea pioneered in Scandinavia, the Winslow CoHousing Group is a kind of commune gone condo that tries to merge the best elements of two very different styles of community life: the efficiency and fellowship of a collective with the privacy and equity of home ownership.

The Winslow group comprises a cluster of small homes situated around a child-care center, recreation area and common dining hall. Residents own their individual housing units, ranging in price from $55,700 for a studio to $160,800 for a four-bedroom duplex, each equipped with kitchen and bath. But everything else is communal. Residents try to eat dinner together in the dining hall five nights a week and brunch on Sundays. Child-care duty rotates among the residents, with several retired townspeople acting as part-time grandparents.

Ironically, what this ultramodern community seeks to re-create is the small- town America of ages ago. "We are people who are looking for some kind of community again," says resident Stephen Zunes, a political scientist. The concept shows signs of catching on. Two other CoHousing villages have been built in California, two more are under construction, and 100 others are in the talking stages. "By the end of the century, every major U.S. city will have a co-housing group," declares Charles Durrett, the California architect who, with his wife, coined the term.

Among its other plans, the Winslow group is looking forward to a sort of test of community cooperation next spring: it aims to plant a vegetable garden in which everyone will share in both the labor and its produce. "We haven't had any personal schisms yet," says Zunes. "So far, we're a big happy family."