Image via CrunchBaseby Paula SpanMy friend Marty and I used to fantasize about a gracious old apartment building in the center of our New Jersey town. It would be great to grow old with a cluster of friends, we told each other, in a place only a few steps from movies and shops, the YMCA and the bus into Manhattan. One day we’d buy it and create the Montclair Old Newspersons’ Home, taking seats on the co-op board so we could approve as residents only people we actually wanted to live with. All it would take was $30 or $40 million that nobody had.
I’ve discussed similar daydreams with women friends, in which sales of now-too-large homes underwrite a shared house in California featuring small apartments, gardens, common areas for cooking and schmoozing, a room for our hired caregivers.
Lots of middle-aged people have such ideas, Craig Ragland, director of the 15-year-old Cohousing Association of the United States, told me in an interview: “Someone brings it up and everyone says, ‘That would be so great.’ And that’s where it ends.”
But a few determined people actually have created what’s called senior cohousing, small developments and neighborhoods that combine private homes with community connections and obligations and spaces.
Most of the 120 or so cohousing communities that the association knows of, with another 80 to 100 under development, are multigenerational, Mr. Ragland said. But Silver Sage in Boulder, Colo.; Glacier Circle in Davis, Calif.; ElderSpirit in Abingdon, Va.; and soon Wolf Creek Lodge in Grass Valley, Calif., are among those built or retrofitted specifically for older people.
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