SOME New Yorkers never get to know their neighbors.
They nod hello, but rarely speak, and they certainly don’t break bread with them. Even names may remain a mystery, unless an errant letter finds its way into the wrong mailbox.
This is precisely the New York that a group of Brooklyn residents hopes to escape.
They plan to do so by pooling their resources to build a project that will be not just an apartment building, but a community that more cynical New Yorkers may consider unachievably utopian.
They envision an arrangement called “cohousing,” a place where neighbors sit down to share meals several times a week, where children roam freely from home to home, and where grown-ups can hang out in a communal living room. They plan, in short, to create a village within a single development, and their chosen site is in the middle of a tree-lined brownstone block in Fort Greene.
The group, which has been incorporated as Brooklyn Cohousing L.L.C., is in contract to buy an unfinished project known as Carlton Mews, whose developers had planned 40 high-end condominiums. The developers drew up plans for apartments surrounding a common courtyard, with the units to be built in an long-abandoned Episcopal church, its former rectory and a new building with a facade that mimics the stately town houses on the block.
Brooklyn Cohousing has bought the rights to the site, the plans and all the city approvals that the developers spent two years amassing, including a go-ahead from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The group hasn’t settled on a project name yet, but it plans to build more modest apartments than the original developers intended and to fill them with families whose lives revolve around the courtyard and 6,000 square feet of common space where residents can cook together, play together, do woodworking or take an art class together.
And they plan to do it all through consensus, with some 40 households jointly deciding things like how big their shared dining room should be and what kind of finishes to put in the private kitchens in their apartments. The goal is to create a place that has a thriving community life, but where everyone can choose to be as private or social as he or she desires.
It would be one of New York City’s first cohousing projects, although there are examples in Ithaca and Saugerties. There are about 110 such projects in the United States and Canada, most in suburban or rural settings. A handful of urban ones exist in Boston, Seattle and Oakland, Calif.
The recent economic downturn may actually have created an opportunity for this type of project.
A developer who can sell an entire project to a single entity runs a lower risk than one who has to sell individual units. Banks may also appreciate that while a developer may have trouble selling unbuilt condos, the cohousing group expects to sell almost all of the project before construction begins.
“In many ways, this will just be an apartment building,” said Alex Marshall, a fellow at the Regional Plan Association who as a founding member began researching cohousing five years ago. “But what will make it different is the intention — that all the members have chosen to live here together in this way.”
Fort Greene’s cohousing apartments, to range from studios to four-bedrooms, will sell for about the market rate. But they will have less square footage than most similar New York apartments. Kitchens and living rooms will be smaller because residents can use the common spaces for entertaining. There will also be no need for spare bedrooms because members will be able to use guest rooms for visiting in-laws and friends.
The Brooklyn group so far has 14 member households, which each have committed $20,000 to $40,000, and in some cases much more, to help pay for consultants and to finance the down payment for the site. It also has about 25 associates, or households that have paid $500 and agreed to attend weekly meetings. Mr. Marshall said the hope was to get enough full members to complete the purchase and get a construction loan to start building next spring so that families can move in by early 2010.
The group’s Web site warns that “the project involves a high degree of risk and is not recommended for persons who do not have a substantial net worth or who cannot afford to lose any membership fees that may be paid.” And before becoming a full member, an associate must meet with the group’s “clearness committee,” which thoroughly explains the project.
“You’re not buying an apartment,” Mr. Marshall said. “You’re becoming a legal member of a community and sharing in the costs and risks of building it.”
Associates can spend as little as two hours a week at general meetings, but full members, like Mr. Marshall and his wife, Kristi Barlow, a documentary film editor, often spend more than 20 hours a week preparing for and attending various committee meetings.
Ms. Barlow said that when their son Max, 4, was born, “it became pretty clear that living as a nuclear family on our own in New York City was not going to be ideal.” Shortly after moving to Prospect Heights, they posted fliers for a meet-your-neighbors event.
“Except for the one neighbor that we had already gotten to know, nobody came,” Ms. Barlow said. “Not all buildings are like that, but that told us very clearly that you can’t always create a community where you are.”
When Mr. Marshall started researching cohousing, he learned that it began in Denmark in its current form, arriving in the United States in the late 1980s.
The Brooklyn group became a legal corporation with four founding families last January and two months later hired Chris ScottHanson, a consultant who has worked on about 40 cohousing projects across the country. He has schooled the members on the consensus process, steered them through site selection and helped negotiate the deal with Carlton Mews; he will also act as a project manager through construction.
Mr. ScottHanson said that the Carlton Mews site was ideal for cohousing. “On a scale of 1 to 10 for cohousing models, it’s an 11.5,” he said, citing “a courtyard in the middle,” “adaptive reuse of a church, renovation of an old town house and new construction” and its site, where “you can look down the street from the roof and see the Empire State Building.”
He said that since the group settled on Carlton Mews, he has been approached by four other Brooklyn developers looking to sell their projects. “There are developers telling me they cannot get construction funding because they don’t have buyers they can point at and show the banks,” he said.
Last spring, as the credit crisis started translating into fewer construction loans, Doug Mcdonald, a developer of Carlton Mews, sought out the group after hearing about it from a friend. “What they’re doing fits in with what we designed,” he said. “We were clever enough to put our lifeboats together and make the deal work for both sides.”
Neither he nor Mr. ScottHanson would discuss what the group is paying for the project, but the amount is probably significantly more than the $10.5 million that the developers of Carlton Mews paid for the site, since the group is also buying the development plans and the work the developers had put in to secure the building permits.
The group hopes to gather people from diverse backgrounds, age groups and socioeconomic levels. Most of the members are white; there are two Asian-Americans and one African-American.
Carl Robichaud, a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York who lives with his wife, Elsie Kagan, an artist, in a house in South Park Slope that they recently renovated, said he was hooked from his first meeting last spring. “What struck me was that the people seemed really grounded and sensible,” he said. “It wasn’t a pie-in-the-sky group of hippie idealists — not that there’s anything wrong with that. But there was a real entrepreneurial spirit that captured me.”
He and Ms. Kagan are expecting a child, and he said he liked the idea of living in a place where people feel connected to one another and where children have many adult mentors in their lives. He said he figured creating a community in his current neighborhood would take 10 years, “and we feel we need to kick-start it — we want that now.”
Marion Yuen, a business strategist and one of the founding members, said that having served as president of a small co-op in Park Slope, she saw the limitations in a building where “you might have friendly neighbors, but people’s inclination to participate and be collaborative varies.” With cohousing, she said, everyone will “want to deliberately and consciously play with everyone else and play nice.”
But how can a group of strangers brought together by the prospect of living in harmony be sure that they will all like one another?
Lissa Wolfe, who works at a sailing school, owns a house in Red Hook and became a full member five months ago, said that the group had essentially been self-selecting. The consensus process and the development process can be so rigorous, she said, that people figure out pretty quickly if they want to stick around to see how it all turns out.
There is at least one other household, though, that Ms. Wolfe will know well. Her parents, Sue and Joel Wolfe, decided to join the group after attending several meetings “just to be supportive.” Sue Wolfe, a retired Bloomingdale’s executive, said that the project appealed to her immediately, but that her husband, a retired chef, was originally reluctant to leave the Boerum Hill house where they have lived since 1975. “But then he fell in love, too,” she said.
Weekly general meetings start off with the “opening go-round,” where everyone gathers in a circle and says something personal. At a recent meeting, that included the informative: “I’ve been traveling and it’s good to be back”; the emotive: “I’m doing good tonight”; and the slightly offbeat: “I just saw ‘High School Musical 3’ with my daughter and her friends.”
But meeting agendas allow only 10 minutes for this, and the group quickly gets down to business, with everyone wearing a name tag and toting a ring with six colored cards. The card system is the tool used to reach consensus.
It can be daunting for a first-timer. When a facilitator calls for consensus, members hold up cards to signify their positions on an issue. Green means the holder agrees with the decision; blue means he or she is neutral; yellow, is unsure or unclear; orange, has serious reservations but will not block consensus; and red, will block consensus. The group recently added a white card to signify “I’m not up to speed on this issue because I didn’t do my homework.”
Mr. Robichaud said that “after a meeting or two you get the hang of the different colors.”
What becomes clear after a few meetings is that nothing gets decided quickly. “When you live by consensus, it shifts how you function with people,” Mr. Marshall said. “You really have to take your time and listen to people.”
No one wants to be the odd person out, he noted, so when someone takes a stand, he or she usually feels very strongly about an issue. “And sometimes the odd person out turns out to be right,” he said.
Discussions “can get very emotional and people have cried and yelled,” Ms. Yuen said. The facilitator — there are several — tries to break the issue down and help the group resolve the disagreement. “It’s about strangers living together and learning intimacy,” she said.
But given how hard it is for a married couple to work through all the decisions that must be made to build a home, designing a building to please 40 households, each with the power to stop the project in its tracks, may seem herculean.
Ken Levenson, the architect who designed Carlton Mews and who has been hired to redesign the interior space, said that he was apprehensive about the consensus process. “But it’s actually turned out to be less time-consuming than working with developers,” he said. “It’s counterintuitive, but when a decision is made here, it’s really made. They can only speak to me as a group, but when you work with developers, any one of the partners can call you every day with another idea.”
The size of the great room was one of the most contentious issues so far. Most members wanted a room that could comfortably seat the entire community for dinner. Ms. Barlow, fearing that other common amenities would be sacrificed, pushed for a smaller room.
Mr. Levenson said that after a fair amount of back and forth, the group reached a compromise. A common living room was eliminated, and the 1,600-square-foot great room will now serve as a dining and living room. (There will also be a separate adults-only lounge and two children’s playrooms.)
“It was the right thing for the group,” Ms. Barlow said. “I didn’t feel defeated, because through the process I saw that I was really the only one that wanted the smaller space, and in retrospect I think the community was smarter than me.”
When it comes to the last-minute decisions that invariably arise during construction as contractors discover that a particular type of kitchen cabinet or countertop is no longer available, the group will leave it to the professionals.
“We have decided as a group to not be involved during construction,” Ms. Barlow said. “We’ll do the conceptual design work and give the architectural team direction on wood floors and color palettes we want and then just let go and let them execute it.”
The alternative, she said, could be a costly and painful process.