Don't we all have hopes and dreams about the kind of place where we'd like to live? I sure have. And I've been fortunate enough to have seen some of those dreams fulfilled from time to time.

Drawn by the dream of living and working where the political action was, my spouse and I lived around American University while I worked on Connecticut Ave. and she interned at the E. O. B. Intensely disillusioned by that experience, we hit the road in a van until we landed in a remote valley in northern New Mexico where we built an adobe at the edge of the Ponderosas and scrub oaks with more turkeys, coyotes and elk than people for neighbors.

Twenty years, three children and nearly innumerable homes later, we were living--because of work requirements--under an O'Hare runway next to a Metra line, a place so noisy that we never had a good night's sleep in four years. I had fallen in love with sailing, and the whole family would pile in the car to drive up to the Fox Lakes on summer weekends to camp out in a very crowded Catalina 22. After a couple of years of that, we moved to a South Carolina lake where the sailboat was tied up to the dock in the back yard twelve months out of the year. My spouse says we found a place for the sailboat and moved there, but all of us remember how nice it was living where the kids could build a raft out of logs from the woods next door or rescue lost baby ducks or fish for bluegill off the dock.

Now we live in a Cleveland neighborhood filled with abandoned houses. A few days ago, I was out in the front yard and saw one of the many feral cats catch a large rat exiting the empty and collapsing house next door. How can you stand it, you might ask. But one can have dreams even about such a neighborhood (and a few nightmares too).

I've tried to explain in earlier Open Threads how this neighborhood got to be this way. Foreclosures and slumlord vultures were the main cause, and even a multiplicity of local, state and federal programs and tens of millions of dollars have not made much of a dent in Cleveland's vacant house problem. Not surprisingly, those government solutions were really geared to starting a whole new development cycle in the city: tear the old houses down and build new houses or offices in their place. That's happening in some places in Cleveland--the city is enjoying something of a renaissance--but there are far too many of these neighborhoods for all of them to be redeveloped.

The abandoned buildings in our neighborhood are single and two-family houses, but in many parts of Cleveland, there are many empty and decaying apartment buildings. In New York a couple of decades ago, squatters occupied a number of similar abandoned buildings to which the City of New York had title after tax foreclosures, etc. For a while, the city tried to expel them, but eventually the city negotiated to hand the buildings over to the squatters and let them be run as co-ops with restrictions on re-sale and the income of residents. Umbrella House was one of those buildings:

Umbrella House has come a long way from the late 1980s, when a handful of squatters broke into what was then an abandoned city-owned tenement house and claimed it as their home. Today, most of the early homesteaders remain and the building has been converted into a co-op that operates like many others, though with a more utopian and collectivist ethos.

On a recent afternoon Parker Pracjek, a college administrator and adjunct professor who has lived in Umbrella House for a decade, was on the roof, discussing the building’s newest undertaking: an 820-square-foot vegetable garden tended by volunteers. The garden provides fresh produce and herbs for the 32 or so inhabitants of the 18 apartments, as well as a respite from some of the rigors of city life.

“After a morning spent in a piece of nature, I just might be able to face the concrete and the throngs of people below,” Ms. Pracjek said. “We don’t always think about the grounding or sanity that comes from picking one’s own meal from a garden.”

Adapting such an idea to our Cleveland neighborhood would result in something more along the lines of "cohousing:"

Cohousing is an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space. Each attached or single family home has traditional amenities, including a private kitchen. Shared spaces typically feature a common house, which may include a large kitchen and dining area, laundry, and recreational spaces. Shared outdoor space may include parking, walkways, open space, and gardens. Neighbors also share resources like tools and lawnmowers.

Households have independent incomes and private lives, but neighbors collaboratively plan and manage community activities and shared spaces. The legal structure is typically an HOA, Condo Association, or Housing Cooperative. Community activities feature regularly-scheduled shared meals, meetings, and workdays. Neighbors gather for parties, games, movies, or other events. Cohousing makes it easy to form clubs, organize child and elder care, and carpool.

The Cohousing Association linked above is directed at brand-new communities designed for cohousing by architects, but the cohousing idea applied to neighborhoods like ours with lots of abandoned houses would be an approach to revitalization that holds a lot of promise. Look at how it solves many of the problems that owner-occupiers like us face during the rehab process:

1) Security

It is more or less impossible to rehab a house in a neighborhood unless you live in it. As soon you put anything valuable in the building--wiring, copper pipes, a hot water heater, tools--it will be stolen if left overnight. I camped out here as soon as the electric panel was installed and the electricity turned on. Cohousing would ease the security burden by distributing it across more people.

2) Tools

Decent tools are very expensive. We once had all the necessary tools when we built the adobe in New Mexico, but when we arrived in Cleveland, we had none. Cohousing puts purchase and ownership of tools in a coop and the tools are shared as needed.

3) Skills

My spouse and I had built a house decades earlier and had some skills, but otherwise it's the old do it once, fuck it up, tear it back down and do it again the right way. Cohousing allows for skill sharing, and not just for the building tasks.

4) Permanence

The coop ownership structure means that the cohousing community continues even as individual members move or pass away. It also prevents a problem common to other housing programs like Habitat for Humanity that saw many of its owners lose their homes in the Great Crash.

A cohousing/coop approach, combined with flexible zoning that allowed the people living in the neighborhood to have a small business where they live, could help revitalize neighborhoods like mine without "market forces" eventually displacing all the people who lived in the neighborhood before revitalization began.

I'd love to hear your reactions to cohousing along with your dreams about your ideal place to live.