Transcription
Hello, this is Angela with Parkour's Permaculture. Since I did the first part of this video in this very car, parked at this very park, I figured it would be appropriate to do the promised follow-up video from the same location.
My boys are at park day, running around, having a good old time, and it's quite windy, so I can't really film outdoors. I hate making videos and then discovering there's wind noise in them and that y'all have to put up with that. So, in the minivan, it is today.
I made a video not that long ago about how I have this yearning to live in an eco-village, and I wanted to do some legwork and some networking and connecting with other folks to see what it would take to start an eco-village in Portland. Now, Portland, Oregon already has two eco-villages. One is rentals only, and one is kind of a co-housing condominium model, and it is full. There are no vacancies there. So, I just really always had this yearning to want to live in community, and I've tried many kinds of community: church, roller derby, homeschool co-ops. But I would love to have an agricultural-based, sustainable living-based community. So, I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna really dig in and spend a good chunk of time researching what it would take to form one in Portland, Oregon."
I requested, uh, folks give me their stories and experiences if they've lived in an eco-village or a co-housing community, either in the Pacific Northwest or anywhere in the world. And I got more than 50 people replying. I also spoke with the founders and co-founders of four different eco-village and co-housing communities, some in the Pacific Northwest and some elsewhere in the Midwest. And, um, for reasons that we'll get into later, I'm going to kind of keep it a little bit anonymous as to who I talked to, because not all of the experiences were glowing, and there were some really just, and, um, understandable criticisms and critiques. And I want to make sure that I protect the folks who may still be living in these communities from feeling like they might be put in the spotlight with their criticisms. So, I don't have permission to use names, and I'm going to make sure that I'm, I'm careful in talking about that because I want to respect the facts that the fact that folks who may have struggles living in community may still need to function and exist in those community spaces, and I don't want to make it difficult for them.
So, I also spoke with two different developers that have in the past and are planning in the future to work on co-housing eco-village development. And I spoke with folks at the land trust where we also, um, have our land trust relationship with the folks who own the land and we own the house, and they have some kind of co-housing focused communities. I also spoke with folks from failed attempts at forming eco-village and co-housing communities and who still live in a single-family dwelling and have kind of given up on the idea. So, overall, I spoke with 60 people, um, 60, I want to say like 64 people, maybe 63, I'd have to go back and check my notes, um, about their experiences in co-housing or attempting co-housing or being a developer or being a founder for co-housing and eco-village life. And I thought that I would kind of compile all those into [Music] this video, but kind of distill them through my thoughts and where I want to go next. And I'm going to open up my bubble water because, dang, I'm really thirsty. So, hang on a second.
I will be the first to admit that I can be a little bit naive, that I have this really idyllic notion of what it would be like to live in community. And the folks I spoke with over the last month or month and a half have done a fabulous job of bursting my bubble, and I want to thank them for that. Because you don't want to make big life changes like thinking about investing all of your retirement money, or selling your home, or creating a business and trying to launch a co-housing community, only to have it go sideways real fast. Those are huge risks to take. And for me, it would be a risk not just for myself as an individual, but also for my entire family. So, um, the consequences are pretty steep. And so, I really want to say thank you to the folks who gave their cautionary tales. Um, I heard you, and I, I am actively listening to what you have to say.
So, some of the things I, I found out right off the bat, let's just talk about some of the issues. Some of these I knew going into it. Number one, land in Portland or in the Pacific Northwest is incredibly expensive. Uh, we cannot compete with developers here. Developers just drive the price up. They can buy any one-acre plot or 10-acre plot or 60-acre plot because they have deep pockets, and they can just, you know, rip out the existing housing that's there and put in high-density housing. And in Portland, they encourage high-density housing. So that means homes with larger plots or larger swaths of land are diminishing in favor of building high-density housing. That is kind of a priority for the city. They want to have more high-density housing, and they want to have folks be non-car users. And, uh, so that means that we just, we can't compete with the development goals of the city and the deep pockets of capitalism, and that makes it virtually impossible to afford land.
I have done lots and lots and lots of looking and speaking with other folks who have tried to launch co-housing communities. Several of them have lost their shirts in in speculation in attempting to launch communities where they just couldn't get it off the ground because they can't compete with developers.
That brings me to my second point. Some of the successful co-housing communities and eco-village communities I spoke with, they use a capitalist, for-profit model. They often partner with a developer. So maybe some initial investors will get together, folks who want to live in one, and they will partner with a developer, and then they will sell those units at a profit in the co-housing or eco-village community. So, you will buy in, and you will pay a premium at market rate or higher. That means a lot of the co-housing situations I looked at in the Pacific Northwest run very easily between $450,000 and $850,000 for, um, you know, studio apartment size living up to two-bedroom. A couple were three-bedroom, but even a three-bedroom, you're looking at maybe 1100 square feet, plus of course, all of the shared amenities and shared space you get with co-housing as well. So, I don't want to say that like you're purchasing this little tiny property that you don't get a full value for. You do, you get all of the other things you get from co-housing communities, but it is very, very, very expensive.
So, my hopes are initially dashed after speaking with folks and saying like, "Look, unless you want to partner with a developer, and you and the developer, you have deep pockets and you can invest, and the developer's going to make a tidy sum off of it, don't even bother trying." One of the developers I spoke with basically said the same thing, like, "Leave it in the hands of professional developers. If you want to get into a co-housing situation, just buy into one." As if I have five or six hundred thousand dollars sitting around. And for me, so much of my yearning to be in a co-housing community is to have a sustainable community, to have one that's accessible to people that can't necessarily afford housing otherwise in Portland, folks who have really, um, strong values and goals and work ethic that, uh, lean toward wanting to live a sustainable and eco-village-centered life, but don't have those deep pockets.
So, that was really disheartening to hear because I obviously don't want to become part of a community that's just like, "Who are the folks with money that can afford this?" And that's what I found looking at some of these communities, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. The demographics are basically the vast majority white, over 55, and, um, financially really privileged because that's who can afford to buy into these models. And so, you find these communities that are pretty stratified. They're pretty like heavily leaned toward white and wealthy, and, uh, typically older because that again is who has money in their retirement accounts and that they can use for this, or who just has large sums of savings in general, or has been in the property real estate market for quite a while and has a lot of equity in their house. And so, for me, like, I'm not interested in that. Like, I'm a white 43-year-old woman. I don't want to live with a bunch of people exactly like me, or exactly like me, but have a lot more money and are maybe a little bit older. That does not interest me. And I don't think that that's fair and equitable, and I don't think that's in keeping with my ideals. So, I'm not looking for a little isolated enclave of people who are white and wealthy where we kind of play at, you know, like green living. That's, that's not what I'm interested in.
Which leads me to my third issue that I found looking into this is that, especially in the Pacific Northwest, you get this issue where folks, um, who can buy into these communities are white and wealthy, and that means they can afford to purchase things that they want. They have the money, and so they don't want to spend the life hours. So, I heard the criticism from multiple folks in these eco-village either startups or attempts or in current eco-village situations that, um, folks don't really want to do the work of an eco-village. They don't want to prune the orchard. They don't want to maintain the food forest. They don't want to do the gardening. They don't want to do those things that require the physical output and the output of time, particularly as they get older, which is totally reasonable. But then they have a problem where their community is older, they don't want to do the physical labor, but they don't have any of those younger folks because younger folks can't afford to live in these communities. So, you end up with food forests that have deteriorated. You end up with situations in which the maintenance is not being done. It has to be hired out. You end up with situations where folks don't want to put forth the effort. And it does take effort, believe me, as somebody with a quarter-acre permaculture property and, you know, 40 fruit trees, it takes a lot of work. Takes a lot of work to plant, to maintain, to harvest, and then to preserve. And so, what you get are these communities where folks don't want to do that kind of work. And so, while they have an orchard right out their back door, they would rather just order grocery delivery from the local organic market and get a bag of apples delivered to them instead of having a canning day where everybody picks all of the tomatoes, and we all get together and we can the whole community's year's worth of salsa and tomato sauce, pasta sauce. Instead, they would just rather order delivery from the local organic market and get jars of sauce. So, there is that kind of like trade-off of folks, once they reach a certain threshold, they would rather just spend the money because they have it. And for me, that was really discouraging to hear that like, "Well, you may have an eco-village plan, that doesn't mean that the members, especially members who are more affluent, are interested in actually doing the work." What they would like is the ideal of an eco-village. Everybody wants to come over and visit my permaculture garden. I don't think in reality, everybody wants to do the work of maintaining a permaculture garden. And I think it's the same for eco-villages. Folks love the idyllic notion of strolling through a food forest and like picking flowers and like plucking those berries off the vine, and they love the aesthetics of it. But it takes work to maintain those aesthetics. It takes labor to produce a yield. And so, um, you end up with a situation where folks would rather just, forgive me if this sounds derogatory, but they would rather just kind of play act at eco-village life, and they would rather pay somebody else to do the labor, and they would then reap the aesthetic benefits of living in a lush, green, verdant community. So, that's all really discouraging, and I heard those kinds of stories many times.
I heard from folks who live in rental models that it's hard because they felt like they didn't have any ownership in the decision-making, only the landlord did. I heard from folks who live in the condominium model feeling that they were frustrated because everything has to be done by consensus, and it takes forever, and one person can really clog up the gears of a community and really just grind a community to a halt to a point where it becomes dysfunctional and nothing gets done, and the community can kind of lose its vision. So, some of the governance issues also were at play, and that was good for me to hear those cautionary tales. I've heard from folks who have kind of more of a representative model that tends to work better, uh, that kind of takes a larger scale community, and for all of those communities that I've heard of that have that kind of representative, city council kind of model, community council kind of model, they had to struggle through those other models, particularly wade through long periods of getting bogged down with consensus before they switched to something else.
So, all of that is kind of where, um, I'm sitting right now with all of those pieces of data, all of those stories that folks shared with me. On top of it are the lovely stories of folks who have made really good, strong friendships. So, for every person who said something like, "It's one thing to have a toxic person in your workplace, it's another to have a toxic person in your home, in your community. You run into them at the laundry, in the community kitchen, you have to meet with them weekly." For every person I heard a story like that, I heard so many other people say they had forged really good, strong working relationships, and they had had to work really hard on building their communication skills in order to be functional in an eco-village life. So, I don't want to take the wind out of everybody else's sails.
For me, um, it was really eye-opening to hear about, particularly the, the, um, economical issues, the issues of the cost of housing in the Pacific Northwest, the cost of land, the fact that we can't compete with developers, and that the model of starting an eco-village is far more sustainable in other parts of the country than it is in the Pacific Northwest. I made a comment to this kind of tune to this extent in an intentional community's Facebook group, and I got the comment of like, "Why don't you just go to like Puerto Rico or Costa Rica and do it there? It's way more affordable. Go to Belize." [Music] I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in playing a colonialist and having my pennies go farther just because I've moved to a place where the cost of living is less. I'm not interested in going and taking space and land away from the local community to start my eco-village. That does not appeal to me at all. For the same reason that I am frustrated and feel that it is unsustainable and inequitable to have developers come and snatch up all the land in Portland, I am not going to go to Central America and drive up the cost of land. And, you know, I just, I want us to all get away from the notion that the way to have our eco-village dreams is to practice colonialism because it's just, it's not the way. Folks, let's not, let's not do that. And I'm zero percent interested in doing that.
So, I don't know where I'm gonna go from here. I'm thinking much more about smaller scale. I talked to a number of folks who have quite successful co-housing models in one house where six or seven folks commit to living together in community and sharing one house. Perhaps they put one or two tiny houses on their property to expand their community. I have thought about if my, um, somebody in my neighborhood close by, perhaps my next-door neighbor, the neighbor behind me, were to ever sell their house, could I form an LLC and purchase those properties and create an eco-village right around my own home? Stay where I am, have the mature food forest that I have, have my ducks and chickens and bees, and be able to share them with more folks by being able to rent out at an equitable, sustainable rate housing to other folks, folks who might not be able to afford to buy in, or might not want a long-term eco-village situation, but would love to live in a co-housing situation of a few households, two or three or four, and practice that model. So, that's something that like, I love my neighbors. I'm not saying I want my neighbors to move away, but that's something that that gets tossed around in the back of my head because I've seen some of these, these models, and they seem the most successful in the Pacific Northwest where folks buy two or three or four houses together, or they buy an apartment building, like a six-plex or something, and they set up their co-housing that way. So that they know, um, the scale is going to be small, the expectations are going to be smaller, and they have kind of all of those same guidelines. And they also include rentals, so that folks who have been historically shut out of the housing market, folks who are younger, folks who may not want to live somewhere for a really long period of time, also have access to the eco-village model. And that makes it a much more diverse model, in my opinion. And that's kind of what I'm leaning towards.
So, for now, we're going to stay put in our little home. I'm still actively dreaming of a co-housing model. I'm still sifting through all of the emails from folks who have who have emailed me. I really, really appreciate all of the folks who took time to chat with me over Zoom and over the phone, the folks who met with me in person, the multiple eco-village and co-housing communities that let me come and take a tour. I really, really thank you all for sharing your experiences. When you are willing to, um, gift your time and your energy and your testimonial, that really helps everybody else who's interested in thinking about this way of living. It's really good to open our eyes to the realities of what it's like, really examine the barriers, and then try to design for how we can remove those barriers.
There is a need for co-housing. There is a need for eco-villages. Heck, there's a need for us to completely revamp the way we live in America. Isolated, lonely for so many of us. So many of us don't have access to access to the resources that we need. And so many of us have accumulated more resources than we know what to do with. And what if we could have these kind of communal spaces, communal utilization of resources, and increase our ability to communicate, work through conflict, and rely on each other, form those strong local bonds, local community, local sustainability? So, I'm still a big proponent of the eco-village model. I just can't figure out how it's going to work for me here in Portland, Oregon, in a way that fits with my ethics, and in a way that's realistic, and doesn't take millions and millions of dollars, and doesn't exclude all kinds of folks that I feel have a right to access the co-housing model.
So, I would again love to continue to hear your thoughts and your feedback. I'm going to keep keep those doors open in the back of my mind. Keep looking. Keep observing before I interact. Keep following those permaculture principles where I look for slow, small solutions. I'm willing to be patient. I'm willing to keep doing the best I can with what I have, what resources are available to me. And I hope you do too. I hope that if you have a story about co-housing and eco-village living, if you have insight, that you will email me at parkerspermaculture@gmail.com.
We are in the process of moving my father into assisted living right now, which is maybe a whole other video because, dang, assisted living facilities. Now that I've toured them, toured several of them, they really get a lot about co-housing right, including many of them affordability. And so much about the way assisted living works in this country, obviously age-stratified in a way that may or may not be great. But so much about it borrows from the co-housing model in a way that's pretty darn functional. And so maybe I'll talk about that in another video. But, um, I may be slow to get back to emails just because it's a really, really busy time in our lives right now, trying to get my dad situated in a living situation that that meets his needs and keeps him safe and improves his quality of life. So, I hope that, uh, you'll continue to tune back in. I should be back from my permaculture garden here in zone 8b later this week. Thanks.