Imagine a community where close friends and neighbors regularly share meals together; where children are free to roam and range where they will; where elders are safe and secure; where the pace of life is gentler; where an ideal balance between community and privacy reigns. Picture this place nestled under green canopies and copses, just a casual stroll from the American River, on a 4-acre plot of the Sacramento County village of Fair Oaks. If the people of the Fair Oaks Co-housing project have their way, this vision will become more than just a dream. By 2017, it will begin to be a reality.

Charles Durrett is a man with the vision, skill and experience that can bring this kind of community to architectural fruition. It was Durrett, along with his wife and partner, Kathryn McCamant, who coined the term co-housing, a type of intentional community which harmonizes the best aspects of both communal and private living. Durrett is the chief architect and grand inspiration behind 55 co-housing communities worldwide. Indeed, fewer than 25 years after Durrett and McCamant first conceived of the idea, co-housing communities have turned into a something like a social movement. Currently there are 161 established co-housing communities, completed or intended, globally. More than 30 of these are already up and running here in California.

The idea for co-housing first came to Durrett, who grew up in both Sacramento and Nevada Counties, on a trip he took to Denmark in 1980. He took a stroll through some rather dreadful conurbations that were very much like many of the Sacramento neighborhoods he had remembered: stale communities where there was nothing happening between the dead spaces of the housing and apartment complexes.

Suddenly, he stumbled upon a neighborhood where things were different. “People stopped and chatted, and had tea together” remarked Durrett. “People conversed with each other. I went from a bunch of buildings where nobody seemed to live, to a community where everybody lived. I stopped and I asked them what's going on here. They said they had grown up in a high-functioning neighborhood and that's how they wanted their kids to grow up. So, I thought, if I ever move back to Sacramento I want to live in a place like this.”

A co-housing project blends the best aspects of a village, a suburb, a commune, and a hometown, while ingeniously doing away with some of most undesirable traits of all of these. The key is to cluster private dwellings strategically around a shared space. Co-housing is made up of an aggregate of private homes grouped around common grounds where there are gardens, walkways, a meeting house or play areas for the children. Each of the associated single family homes resembles a normal house with the usual amenities, including a private kitchen and bathrooms. A co-housing community is not invasive and claustrophobic, like a typical commune; but it is not moribund and alienating, like a typical suburban housing tract. Indeed, co-housing incorporates the most desirable aspects of common living - like having neighbors who share resources like tools and appliances - while eliminating the more stifling aspects of a communal life. Co-housing makes it possible to preserve the integrity of a single family, while enjoying all of the blessings of a traditional community.

After his original inspiration, Durrett and McCamant went on to design dozens of co-housing communities, including their own group located in Nevada City, as well the co-housing on 1.25 urban acres in downtown Sacramento. Durrett said, “We initiated and designed that project on 5th and T Streets. If you go by there you will see a different life. When we planned that project, there were plenty of people who didn't want to live in Oak Park, so they started talking about a suburban neighborhood. Unfortunately, it took them a while to settle on a piece of property, but they finally did. And people came and went. They moved in 1992 and 1993.”

The Fair Oaks co-housing project has proven to be much more difficult for the initiating group to get off the ground, though not for lack of trying. What's bedeviled the project most has to do with the high cost of living in this rather upscale bend on the American River, as well as the byzantine permit process which the County requires all building ventures to navigate. “The property was a fortune,” said Durrett, “When it comes to development in Sacramento County it’s extremely challenging. I haven’t worked in a county anywhere — even in Australia, New Zealand, Denmark — that was as challenging as Sacramento County. They figure out how to make everything cost as expensive as it possibly can. The bureaucracies are so big, so encumbered, and pretty darn inefficient.”

Nevertheless, in spite of the financial and bureaucratic challenges, the Fair Oaks co-housing project was worth it — or, at least, it will be once they are able to get enough members to buy into the dream. According to Durrett, they have the opportunity to live up to their eco-village aspirations with serious gardening aspirations, for instance, in perfectly suited conditions. “What makes Fair Oaks co-housing the most different, as far as I’m concerned,” continued Durrett, “and the number one thing that’s special about it is that the parking is rather remote. So when you get into this neighborhood, it’s zero car-orientation. They don’t even have that at 5th and T because there's an alley that goes through their project. So, that by itself is extremely unique from anything in Sacramento.”

With co-housing, Durrett and McCamant offer a way forward through so many modern dilemmas, chief of which is the devastation and unsustainability of living in an automobile-centered culture while trying to provide for the happiness and comfort of the young and the elderly. “Where we live,” said Durrett, “we had a 97-year-old woman who lived right next to her car. Because of the site plan, there were some cars right next to the units. When she moved in, she moved in right next to her car. A few years later, mostly because her kids talked her into it, she moved to a house that was 700 feet from her car. I stopped and chatted with her one day on the sidewalk and I said, ‘Meg, Why did you move 700 feet from your car?’ and she said, ‘Chuck, my relationship to my neighbor is a lot more important to me and my well-being than my relationship to my auto.’”

Durrett pointed out the stark difference in lifestyle for the elderly when there is a stable, close-knit community to lend immediate support. “In Nevada County, we have these huge, ridiculous buses called Telecare that are designed just to move seniors around; mostly to the pharmacy and to the doctors. Last year we had 64,000 trips for 2,000 seniors. But we have 20 seniors in my co-housing and we’ve never had one Telecare, because, like last night, I gave an 82-year-old senior a ride to her Lion’s function. It was easy. It was fun. It was no skin off my back — and that’s what happens in a village-like setting — or a co-housing community — and it happens all day. We’ve never had a Telecare, or Meals on Wheels or Nurses on the Go.”

Durrett points out that Americans drove 5 billion miles last year just to get senior Meals on Wheels and Nurses on the Go. “So, we have to change, and the only sustainable solution is a more village-like setting. I’m dead surprised that the government is not running after this. I was in Spain a couple months ago and when I got off the plane my host said, ‘Chuck we had 12,934 people die in the last heatwave in just a couple of days.’ These were mostly seniors who were cast adrift. Now, all it takes to keep somebody alive is a damp towel and somebody who gives a damn. So, the issues are not so much can we connect with our car, it’s can we connect with our neighbor? And those seniors and disabled will be better served in that co-housing community in Fair Oaks than any other community in the whole of Sacramento County, except for the co-housing community downtown.”

As far as youth is concerned, co-housing is quite possibly the best thing that can happen to a childhood. All of the communities are integrally designed so that kids have ample space and opportunity to have the kind experience that most of us had back before life became so strangely intimidating that we never let our youth roam free anymore.

But the uniquely conceived safety of co-housing can bring back those carefree days. Durrett mentioned an 18-year-old young woman who had grown up in his co-housing village. He said, “She is writing a report right now that says she has never heard of one single kid who grew up in co-housing who used drugs.”

In reference to the essential meaning of life, British Author E. M. Forster pithily said, “Only connect.” When we consider the multiple social and environmental crises facing our nation and our world, we are often at a loss as to how to confront these challenges by restoring the vital connections that once linked us to that invisible web of communal concern, engaged compassion and mutual aid which is only dimly reflected in the digital shadow of the internet. The devastating problems of homelessness, drug abuse, suicide, emotional alienation will not go away until we figure out real, practical ways to structure our communities and the society emerging from them, in more insightful and sensitive ways.

Thoughtful and forward-thinking visionaries like Charles Durrett and Kathryn McCamant design proven architectural solutions which help preserve our need for privacy and individuality while, at the same time, laying down those lines of palpable connection and human communion which are so essential the meaning and purpose of our being here, on this little blue planet Earth. Co-housing can connect us through intricate harmonization of personal family identity with communal integrity, and in so doing it is one of the brighter paths to a better future.