Neighbors in Growing Co-Housing Movement Share Land and Lives

CHARLOTTE, Vt. —  Judy Rowe hunches over a row of dirt on a brisk Sunday before the hard frost. She plants bulb after bulb of garlic in the vast garden so the herb will flourish next summer.

Rowe is known for the flowers and vegetables that grow in her own yard, but this plot is for all-- all the members of the Ten Stones Community.

Thirteen households share the elaborate garden and 88 acres of land as well as parts of their lives and a commitment to developing substantive relationships with their neighbors. That’s why they live here.

“It was just instant,” Rowe, 68, says of her draw to Ten Stones seven years ago. “I was looking for a sense of community. I wanted to live with all ages of people. And what I really wanted was . . . to be a steward of the land.”

Then a recently retired gerontologist, she had moved back to Vermont from Connecticut. Ten Stones was the answer.

“The community as a whole looks out for each other,” she says.

Ten Stones combines two concepts: co-housing, which started in Denmark, where houses are built around a village-like common space and a common house, and the idea of intentional community, such as Findhorn in Scotland, where residents create an environment that supports personal growth on emotional, social and spiritual levels.

Residents are not linked by religious or philosophical beliefs, just a desire to live more economically, ecologically and cooperatively.

A Developing Trend

That desire has taken off around the country. The number of co-housing developments has doubled to 45 in the last two years, and 150 others are being planned in 37 states, according to the Cohousing Network, based in Boulder, Colo., and Berkeley.

More are cropping up in Vermont. A group of seven households called Northern Vermont Cohousing has 46 acres in South Burlington and is looking for others to join. The group plans to develop as many as 50 units of co-housing in two clusters.

Another group, dedicated to alternative energy and ecological living, has started building on 230 acres in Hartland.

At Ten Stones, the 13 homes sit on half-acre lots around a large green--the heart of the community, where children play, spontaneous baseball games come alive in the summer, and members gather in warm weather for barbecues or pizza baked in an outdoor wood oven.

From the outside, it’s like many other close rural neighborhoods-- communal vegetable garden, acres of field and woods, trails for walks and cross-country skiing.

What’s different is it’s more intentional, says Edorah Frazer, a spokeswoman for the group. People chose to live here and among each other. They designed their homes with energy-efficient standards in mind, they support one another and their children, and they work together in the garden.

Once they build a common house on the green, they’ll have a place to share meals if they want. They’ll have a room for community activities, as well as a greenhouse and a root cellar, Frazer says.

A relative newcomer who moved in three years ago, Frazer has long been interested in intentional communities and is excited to talk about this one. She relishes the relationships she’s developed with young and old.

“I’m very happy to be involved with the lives of many of the children here and the elders too,” she says. “We have two three-generation families here.”

Desire for Community

Frazer and her husband are both graduate students. They had longed for years to be part of a community, seeking the benefits of rural life--solitude and closeness to the land--while developing nurturing relationships with neighbors.

Many years later they found it. They moved from New Hampshire to live at Ten Stones. They had tried to form co-housing projects in Seattle and New Hampshire, where their jobs as a teacher and a physical therapist had taken them, but neither project got off the ground. It takes a financial plunge and a fierce commitment to start a community like Ten Stones, she says.

When they learned about the community in Charlotte, just five houses stood on the 88 acres, and the members were carrying a heavy debt.

Frazer and her husband bought one of the half-acre lots, which cost an average $55,000, and designed and built their straw bale house with help from the architect living next door. The design was inspired by Rowe’s single-person dwelling across the green.

Each of the 13 homes has its own style--the adobe look of straw bales covered in stucco sits alongside more traditional dwellings that blend into the surroundings with green roofs and subtle colors. A wetland built on the land filters the wastewater.

Ten Stones started on paper as a graduate school project for Ted Montgomery, who later became an architect and a founding member. He has built a sprawling house at the edge of the woods, with plants sprouting from planters on one angle of its roof.

Frazer says at Ten Stones there’s less of a chance that people won’t get along.

“In a subdivision you don’t go around and meet everyone before they move in. It’s not that intentional. You go there, you hope you like the people,” she says.

“Here, we came here. There was a process by which we met each other. We consciously chose to. If you’re lucky, in a subdivision it happens naturally. If you’re lucky, but there’s certainly no guarantee. Here, there’s no guarantee either, but the likelihood is much higher.”

Some wish the community were larger. They’re working with the town, which had to modify its zoning laws to allow the houses to be built closer together, making possible the sale of three more lots.

And the lots are in demand. Ten Stones keeps a waiting list.

One family that has its eyes on a lot is renting a house from a Ten Stones family that is spending the year in Europe. At first they regretted leaving their home on Lake Champlain in Colchester this fall, says Joan White-Hensen, but in only a few weeks they were ready to sell the house and never go back.

Her Danish husband had a hand in the start of Ten Stones, and she realized the neighborhood was not only ideal for her two sons, ages 2 and 4, but valuable for her as well.

The spontaneous interactions at the playground, in the garden, in the driveway, and visits from kids after school were something she had missed in the lakeside community that became deserted in the winter.

“I just feel that it nurtures my desires to be part of a bigger piece,” she says.

For Rowe, the intimacy took some getting used to. She had to give up a tendency to keep things to herself.

“If something’s happening in your life, you let people know about it. That’s the thing about the intentional community that was hardest for me,” she says.

“But when you put it out there, and you’re supported, it really is amazing.”

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