In June of this year, when we sold and said goodbye to our blue-shingled bungalow-style house of nine years and left Maryland for California, my family and I hadn’t stepped foot inside the Oakland, California, rental we were about to move into. But it didn’t matter that our living situation was about to change drastically, or that we were about to move across the country—because I was going home.
My husband and I started our family on the West Coast, more specifically in Southern California, where he and I met, and where I and my two daughters, who are now 10 and 12, were born. I’ll forever love its tangled freeways, sherbet sunsets, and strip-mall sushi restaurants. My husband never did, and likely never will, and since I’d been conditioned to believe in the American dream—marriage, children, a single-family home in the suburbs—I agreed to go east, where the prescribed lifestyle wouldn’t put us in debt.
We bought our standalone in 2013 and spent our days watching the kids run barefoot through our grassy yard and chase fireflies. They swung on the porch swing eating ice cream, climbed the Japanese maple in the front yard, and, during the winter, built snowmen and snow forts in the backyard.
At Quimper Village in Washington, cottage-cluster residents benefit from the workshop and consensus-driven process practiced by McCamant & Durrett and other cohousing architects.
But as they grew older, they didn’t stay outside as long in the winter. My husband bemoaned having to shovel snow, and I dreaded having to wake up in the dark to de-ice the car before school drop-offs. Fall and spring were temperate and undeniably magnificent, but spring was often short-lived, giving way to brutally hot and humid summers. Playing or even sitting outside was difficult, the mosquitos merciless. I dreaded summer the most.
More troubling was that as the years wore on, the promises of homeownership started to wear thin. Demanding work weeks gave way to weekends spent in full maintaining our yard. Paychecks would go straight to repairs. Walking around the house some mornings, I’d stare at paint cracks in the ceiling, a leaky washing machine, and windows that needed replacing, and feel so overwhelmed that I’d want to crawl back into bed. I longed to be able to call a landlord.
That’s about the time my escapist tendencies took over. It was 2020, and I would scour Zillow for single-family homes in Oakland, where my husband’s company headquarters were (and where he’d be paid more), where we had family and friends, and where a multicultural population would better suit our family (my husband is Afro-Caribbean and I’m of Mexican, Scottish, and Danish descent). Everything about it was inviting except for the price tags. Purchasing or renting a standalone in any highly rated public-school district was more than we wanted to pay, and a higher mortgage would mean more work, more stress, and less free time, putting us right back where we started.
Designed by Richard Renner, this coastal cohousing project in Maine consists of three connected homes with shared amenities intended for six individuals. It’s small by cohousing standards but remains an effective unit for analysis.
Multifamily rentals, however, were a different story. Options on Zillow still looked relatively expensive—in some cases double our Maryland mortgage. But they were cheaper than a California one, and, as renters, if a repair were needed? We could call the landlord.
It got me thinking about my family’s needs and preferences for housing, and how they might figure into one of the more dense and expensive areas of California. We knew we wanted all of our interior living spaces to be private, but were happy to share the rest, like yard space, or storage areas. There was even more t
