by David Wann
Boulder’s Holiday Neighborhood: Not Only Sustainable, but Also Affordable
Originally settled during the gold rush of the 1850s, Boulder’s gold now lies in its quality of life. Over the years, city leaders have championed a great system of bike trails, a well-used bus system, and an extensive tapestry of open space, funded through a small tax levy at the county level. The city maintains a geographical identity with a surrounding buffer of farms and ranches, and preserves the quality of its drinking water with a “blue line” above a certain elevation, to protect reservoirs and springs fed largely by snowmelt. Twelve percent of the electricity Boulder uses comes from small-scale hydroelectric turbines installed in the large pipes that gravityfeed water to city users. Boulder has been a victim of its own success: Its well-educated and civic-minded residents are willing to pay top dollar to live there. This has resulted in congested streets, as teachers, nurses, firemen, and merchants commute from more affordable areas. It also limits the social and economic diversity of the city.
What Makes a Neighborhood Great
Cultural Assets
• Great neighborhoods have active residents who participate in newsletters and e-mail listservs for sharing tools, tickets, civic information, and good-hearted jokes. They have discussion groups, community projects such as park cleanup or creek restoration, potluck dinners, volleyball games and skiing parties. (The neighbors of Elgin, Illinois, have a four-foot-tall, wooden Blue Tulip that makes monthly rounds from one yard to another. When the Tulip appears on your front lawn, it’s your turn to host a Friday night neighborhood party.)
• Skill sharing, tool sharing, mentoring of the young by the elderly, job referrals, day care, dog care, neighborhood rosters with telephone numbers and e-mails, bulletin boards—these kinds of activities and tools encourage the creation of “neighbornets.” (In Seattle, famous for its distinctive neighborhoods, Phinney Eco-Village—an existing neighborhood—has a Home Alone group, a natural health group, a peace group, and other networks. It has recently begun taking pledges from neighbors to fight global warming by driving less, not using dryers, using compact fluorescent bulbs, etc.)
• Free entertainment, like twilight conversations in the park; wine-tasting parties in someone’s backyard; or spontaneous, no-pressure bike rides to a landmark in the town (an overlook, favorite bar, or ice-cream parlor).
• Sharing of life’s ups and downs. (If I let you vent your frustrations as we each get home from work, I know I have a listener when I need to vent. If you show me your family album, I’ll show you mine.)
• Neighbors who live in their house for years, creating neighborhood history and neighborhood stewards. (Studies show that hometowns are the most popular places to retire, despite all the literature about “where to retire.” Of the thirty-five million people 65 and older who lived in the U.S. between 1995 and 2000, only 22 percent have left their homes and neighborhoods.
Physical Assets
• Community gardens on vacant lots, utility rights-of-way, and land donated/lent for tax write-offs. Also, the trading of garden produce and recipes from private gardens and kitchens, and neighborhood contracts with local growers (community-supported agriculture). Information about local growers can be found at www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/csa/.
• Transportation by proximity: location, location, location, and planning, planning, planning. Great neighborhoods need stores, parks, pathways, bike trails, and access to public transit (Some banks offer lower interest rates and down payments—often called location-efficient mortgages and green mortgages—to homebuyers).
• Slow, safe streets. Working with city governments, many neighborhoods have requested and received traffic circles, narrower streets, and so on. Studies have shown that the speed and volume of traffic often determine the number of friends and acquaintances neighbors have, with fast, high volume streets reducing that number by a factor of ten. In about twenty states “Safe Routes to School” has won public funding to improve and safeguard sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike paths that link children and their families to schools.
• A gathering place in the neighborhood: a community center or possibly an HOA-owned, formerly private residence with meeting, dining, office, and guest room space. Or at least a familiar space at a library, school, or church near the neighborhood.
At the Holiday neighborhood (named for a old drive-in theater that once occupied the site), the city-linked Boulder Housing Partners mandated that close to half of the 330 homes must be permanently affordable as well as lively, pedestrian-friendly, and energy efficient. Says Cindy Brown, codirector of BHP, “From the beginning, our goal was to create a great place to live and work for people earning different incomes and seeking different types of housing choices.” By hiring a whole team of the region’s most forward-looking developers (rather than just one), the city and BHP arranged diversity by design. Specific features began to appear in the plan, including a community garden and orchard, small neighborhood businesses, a pedestrian walkway, state-of-the art efficiency in building design, space for arts studios and work/live residences, and a mixture of home ownership and rentals.
Various interesting spots to work and play were incorporated on the site plan, which also laid streets out to optimize solar energy. The pedestrian “greenway” extends from one side of the development to the other, cutting through a two-acre “park at the heart” and also through a live/work cluster of residences called Studio Mews, where neighbors and visitors can watch artists and craftspeople create.
Boulder’s environmentally progressive policies helped guide the neighborhood toward sustainability by design. For example, to receive a building permit, any new project must comply with the Green Points ordinance concerning building and landscape elements—from foundations and plumbing through air quality, indoor air quality, and solar energy.
Says green building expert David Johnston, primary architect of the Green Points system, “It keeps housing costs and sizes down so more people who work in the community can afford to own a house here.” As Johnston points out, buildings are one of humanity’s greatest impacts: “Forty percent of all the stuff we make and use in the U.S. goes into buildings, with all the associated pollution and impacts.” He says. “Thirty-five percent of all the raw energy we use—the oil, natural gas and coal—is directly attributable to buildings, and 66 percent of all the electricity that’s generated is used in buildings, primarily for heating, cooling, lighting and appliances. We are also using approximately seventy trillion board feet of softwood (a board foot is a one-inch board, twelve by twelve inches) in our buildings every year to build houses.”
Adds John Wolff, chosen as the developer of three separate Holiday sub-neighborhoods, “Building at thirty units per acre is probably the smartest thing you can do in terms of conservation of land, water, and energy. Consider a typical suburban development of three units per acre—you need ten times as much land area for houses and ten times as much infrastructure for water sewer, utilities, and roadways.” Part of Wolff’s strategy is to build houses around a courtyard or community green—both to reduce the size and expense of individual lawns and create community.
The Holiday neighborhood demonstrates that the way buildings and streets are laid out affects quality of life for the whole lifetime of the neighborhood. For example, residents of the Holiday neighborhood are less likely to accumulate consumer goods because houses there are smaller than the average American home. At the Wild Sage Cohousing community (one unit of the Holiday neighborhood) some carriage houses-over-garages are as small as 600 square feet. The neighborhood will always have physical spaces in common that connect them: the large park, the walkway, and the community garden.5
Neighborhoods on Purpose
I’ve had an opportunity to directly experience the full range of value that neighborhoods can offer because I helped design the twenty-seven-home cohousing community where I live, in Golden, Colorado. I used to have contingency plans for where I wanted to live in five yea
rs; maybe I’d move to New Zealand, or upstate New York, or a small town in western Colorado that doesn’t feel the pace or swim in the smell of smog. But a few years ago, I stopped thinking about moving. And apparently, so did many of my neighbors—we’ve had only three turnovers (four if death is a turnover, and I’m sure it is!) in the last ten years.
From the original group of six households that bought our property together, all six are still here. At the meeting where we decided to buy the land, we weren’t sure others would join our community. We worried that we might be out $320,000—a pretty great price for ten partly wooded acres, in hindsight. The process of building a community wasn’t effortless, and we lost many would-be neighbors as we looked for land. A gem of a parcel right next to the world-famous Red Rocks amphitheater fell through, and other properties either cost too much or offered too little. I happened to be driving around one day, cruising the For Sale signs, when I had the idea of stopping by the Golden planning department to ask them what was available in incorporated Golden—a great little community with a solid downtown area. Tucked right up against the foothills, the city was the territorial capital of the state until 1867, and has a rich historical feel to it. (Sometimes I see hobbyists panning for gold in Clear Creek.) In a place like Golden, we could be less dependent on cars. We could locate our neighborhood within this larger community, building the southwest-style neighborhood we’d been talking about for several years in meetings. What started out as a dream, discussed endlessly in living rooms and borrowed workplace meeting rooms, became a reality!
Harmony Village, in Golden, Colorado, is codesigned and governed by the people who live there. Its twenty-seven homes are all oriented to collect solar energy. Courtesy of the author
What exactly was the dream? It varied among our original households, of course, but was loosely organized around a concept imported from Denmark called cohousing (a translation from the Danish word for “living community” or “living together”). As architectural students in the 1980s, Chuck Durrett and Katie McCamant toured many Danish neighborhoods, noticing something unique about a certain kind of development. Says Chuck, “Whenever we walked into one of Denmark’s several hundred cohousing communities, there was such life there—unlike most suburban or multifamily developments—such a joy and sense of interaction, that we began to comment, “This is unique. This is working. It made other housing seem more like warehousing. There were picnic tables between the houses where neighbors sat. Some would stand and chat for a minute, others would be there for longer, talking, laughing, sometimes eating, engaged. When you walked into a cohousing community, it felt like people had a choice between as much community as they wanted and as much privacy as they wanted. In other housing projects, the choice was just privacy and … privacy.”
Harmony Village has economic, age, gender, and cultural diversity. It also has diversity in personality traits: some are visionary, some excel in dealing with the details. Credit: Julia Rainer
Durrett and McCamant wanted a good place to live and raise a family back home in California, but they didn’t see it on the market so they designed and built it themselves in Emeryville, adapting the Danish model of cohousing. They wrote the book that helped launch a small movement, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, which explained that cohousing included clustered housing with lots of open space and pedestrian paths; remote parking to keep cars and people separate; a community building or common house that typically includes dining room, kitchen, living space, guest room, workshop, and office—shared and maintained by residents. Other shared amenities typically include such things as gardens, playgrounds, picnic areas, and recreational areas for Frisbee, soccer, and lounging. Features like these reduce the need for large private homes and yards, and increase the potential for people to meet their social and physiological needs right where they live. The word is getting out, because since McCamant and Durrett “imported” the idea, a hundred cohousing communities have been designed and built, with an equal number in the planning stages. There are hot spots for the concept in Massachusetts, Colorado, California, Washington, and Oregon, but there are enough other locations to travel across the country, east to west, and visit a different community every night—once a community in Lawrence, Kansas, is completed.
Communities for the Future, Now
I originally joined a cohousing group because somebody had to save the planet. I knew that building houses closer together would use less land, and that organic gardening—my passion—was a central element in many cohousing communities Since future residents of a cohousing neighborhood participate in its design, surely our group could come up with the world’s most sustainable neighborhood at lower than market costs. We learned differently, of course. Our southwestern-style village couldn’t actually be made of adobe because it would take too long to build and cost too much. We couldn’t generate all of our own electricity for similar reasons. But Matt Worswick, the project’s architect, who lives in the neighborhood, and Jim Leach, the developer, did produce an award-winning development with great passive solar orientation and energy efficiency—with the active participation of our expanding community. Piece by piece, we’re incorporating additional features that make the neighborhood more sustainable. Hybrid cars are appearing in our parking spaces, more fruit trees in the orchard, and solar panels on our roofs.
How Cohousing Neighborhoods Meet Human Needs
(Needs are from Max-Neef table)
Subsistence: Efficient homes with passive solar, access to garden produce, lots of home offices.
Protection: There are always meals, medical advice and other support for those who are sick.
Affection: Many good friends are a one-minute walk away. There are many parties and celebrations.
Understanding: Skills and perspectives gained from neighbors, directly, and via e-mail and bulletin boards.
Participation: Each neighbor is a neighborhood citizen, making decisions about common property.
Leisure: Gardening, playing music, and sharing community meals are some leisure activities.
Creation: Neighbors codesign new landscaping, aesthetic features, and celebrations.
Identity: Strengths, passions, and accomplishments are respected by neighbors.
Freedom: Each person “has a piece of the truth” and can safely express dissent and approval.
In fact, the installation of solar energy is a hot topic right now in the neighborhood. With federal tax credits and utility rebates already in place, solar-generated electricity has become very tempting. We have already installed solar panels to power the heavy-duty pump that irrigates our large garden, and now a handful of neighbors are working on how to get good prices and reliable installers for solar energy on our roofs. A core group of environmentalists and sustainability nuts are leading the quest for solar energy, and several have calculated the exact payback of systems that can deliver 100 percent of their household’s electrical needs. For example, at .08 cents a kilowatt-hour, one system would pay itself back in fifteen years. After rebates and tax credits, homeowners would need to finance $4,000, and we’ve been discussing a self-help strategy in which our homeowners association would make loans out of funds we’ve set aside for long-term repairs.
In any group of people, there will be different personality types, skills, and ways of looking at things—we’ve always considered our neighborhood diversity a great asset in problem solving and creative ventures. My role in the solar discussion has been cheerleader. I’m not that interested in the financial details—my strength is more in big-picture thinking, but I really want to see more solar in the neighborhood, to take a stand against climate change. So when the payback calculations seemed to be stalling forward progress, I wrote in an e-mail, “Do we ask for an exact monetary Return on Investment from a new carpet, vacation, or charitable contribution? What about a thirty-year mortgage? We want quality in each of these transactions, but I think some of the ROI for solar is nonmonetary.” I referred to s
ome of the pondering I’ve doing for this book. We also get direct benefits in terms of the human needs we satisfy:
• Security against rising costs (security)
• Ultimate “free” energy and equity, just as if we paid off a mortgage (sustainability, autonomy)
• Satisfaction from being less of a consumer and more of a producer (self-esteem)
• An opportunity to take advantage of a very attractive offer WE made possible with Colorado’s Amendment 37, that gives rebates for solar (political participation)
• A slightly greater chance to live in a world that steers clear of desperate, screw-the-future nuclear energy (empathy, purpose, cooperation)
Ultimately, I don’t think these issues are completely about technology or money but the way we seek satisfaction. One kilowatt of panels, even though expensive, would make me feel good in a way that other purchases wouldn’t. I do the same thing with organic apples from Whole Foods—I don’t even look at the price because their value is greater than their cost differential: they make me feel great physically, keep me from getting sick, taste great, have more minerals, and support good farming in a world that really needs it. Solar panels do similar things, although I wouldn’t want to eat one.
Our neighborhood has already become a community culture, and we’ve already begun to plan for its continuity. I envision a garden that continues to improve over the next three centuries. Because of its layout, with a community building as the central focus and walkways that interconnect the houses, it’s quite possible the neighborhood culture will persist until at least 2307. The water rights we acquired a few years ago (600,000 gallons a year) will still be irrigating a garden endowed with grape vines, raised beds, greenhouses, and shade houses. Enriched with three centuries of compost and cover crops, Harmony Garden will grow some of the region’s finest herbs, and be known throughout the area as a producer of high-quality pesto.