Living Together
Cohousing at Cantine’s Island By Rachelle Gura

When Jasper Weinburd was 3-years-old, he arranged his toy horses in a circle. “They’re having a meeting,” he explained. Jasper’s parents, Wendy and Matthew Weinburd, had been involved in the Cantine’s Island cohousing development group since before he was born. When construction was completed in 1997, the Weinburds moved into one of the twelve houses that make up the Saugerties community. The development group’s biweekly meetings, which had begun in 1990, were “interminable,” says Peter Murphy. He and his wife Susan are the only members of the initial group who stayed with the community until its completion. The rest dropped out over time for various reasons, including the meetings, which “turned a lot of people off,” admits Peter Murphy. But he quickly adds that, since construction, the meetings, which still take place every other week, have been far shorter and easier.
Cohousing started in Denmark in the 1960s, and spread to North America in the late 1980s. In their seminal book, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, (Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA, 1988), Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett described cohousing in Denmark for American readers. The cohousing model, which includes resident management, a physical design that facilitates social contact, common facilities including a common house, and up to several optional group meals each week, appealed to many Americans. There are now more than 100 cohousing communities completed or in development in the US, according to the Cohousing Network, a clearinghouse for the cohousing movement. While most American cohousing communities have larger private homes than their Danish counterparts, cohousing communities in the US and Denmark are in most ways very much alike.
Living in cohousing is not living in a commune, since each family owns its own house. Cohousing communities are “intentional neighborhoods: the people are consciously committed to living as a community,” according to the Cohousing Network.
Cantine’s Island occupies eight acres on the Esopus Creek Gorge. The former landowner lived in a houseboat on the Gorge, and agreed to sell the land to the cohousing community on the condition that it build no more than twelve houses. Five acres are commonly owned, and the twelve privately owned houses and their small gardens occupy the remaining three acres. On the lower section of the property, which is on the waterfront, are commonly owned organic gardens, playground equipment, wood and machine shops, a boathouse and slip, and storage facilities. On an elevated section, a few minutes walk up the hill from the water, the first building you come to is the common house, which has a small seating area, a full kitchen, and tables and chairs for common meals. The private homes create a circle, emanating from the common house.
The homes range from 1,000 to 2,000 square feet—small by American standards. Each house has a relatively small living room that opens into an eating area and kitchen, two or three bedrooms, and one or two bathrooms. Environmental principles dictate that smaller is better. And the common facilities make large private homes unnecessary. You don’t need a garage, for example, if your car is parked in the common lot, and the lawnmower is community owned and stored. And you don’t need a large living/dining area for occasional gatherings of family or friends if you can sign up to use the common house.
But the houses were not cheap by Ulster County standards. They ranged in price from $130,000 to $190,000, which included a $40,000 payment by each buyer, into the community pot, to build the common house and other common facilities. “We totally thought that we were going to turn out to be the most outstandingly affordable cohousing community in the whole world,” jokes Susan Murphy. “We are,” interjects her husband, “but it still wasn’t cheap.” Peter Murphy is referring to the fact that many other US cohousing communities are more expensive than Cantine’s Island, due to higher land and building costs and, often, larger private homes.
The residents park in a common parking lot across the road from their houses. This cuts down on smog and makes it a safer place for kids to play. And, perhaps most importantly, everyone has to walk by the common house and their neighbors’ houses on the way home, facilitating social interaction.
Life has flowed smoothly in many ways at Cantine’s Island—remarkably so. Participation in communal tasks and activities is voluntary. There are two dinners in the common house each week that are prepared by volunteers, and one potluck each week. And there are endless maintenance tasks that need to be done. But there are no required numbers of hours that each resident must contribute. Somehow, things get done.
Ruth Hirsch, a psychotherapist who lives at Cantine’s Island, quips that the smooth nature of life in the community may be due to the number of therapists living there—there are seven. She also says, “everybody’s funny here. That’s a big ‘smoother,’ in life.” Resident Michael Sklaroff says, “there are certain people who do a lot, and that keeps everyone else on their toes.”
The Murphy’s house is full of objects, like a half-painted plaster wall hanging, that indicate creativity in progress. Peter Murphy has a long, thin braid down his back. He’s an emergency room nurse in Manhattan. He goes into the city for a number of twelve-hour shifts in a row, staying in a shared apartment there, and then returns to Cantine’s Island for the rest of the week. Susan Murphy is also a nurse, but the couple decided she should dedicate herself to full-time environmental activism.
The Murphys are certain that cohousing is not for everyone. “It is for trusting and trustworthy people,” says Susan Murphy. “Residents need to be able to think beyond their personal needs,” she adds, “and put the community first.” Peter Murphy notes that one potential resident “wanted not a group to join, but a group to join him. He didn’t last long.” He emphasizes that, “this is not a therapeutic community, and it’s not one big family.”
Cantine’s Island has its legally-required bylaws, but community members decided, when construction was complete, that they didn’t want any additional rules and regulations. “That drove our attorney crazy,” says Peter Murphy, “but we had been functioning well for a number of years as a development group by then and we didn’t want to set rules on dogs and clotheslines.” When issues do arise, they are decided by the consensus of all the residents.
“Having worked in alternative politics and the peace movement, the first time I heard that they were going to function by consensus, I almost went screaming from the room,” says Peter Murphy. So, when he drafted the bylaws, he made sure to include a provision stating that, if a decision could not be made by consensus, and certain “purposefully cumbersome” conditions are met, then it can be decided by a three-quarters vote. So far, members have abstained, and have even reserved “I told you so” rights, but they have not blocked consensus. “If 80 percent of the group gets the feeling that one person is really, really upset about something, it just sort of doesn’t happen,” says resident Michael Compain.
No ruling clique has arisen, which could happen for personality reasons, despite the formal need for consensus. “No one’s passive, and no one dominates,” says Peter Murphy.
One area of some mild contention is the level of communal participation of the ten children residing in the community. Susan Murphy, who does not have children, feels that the kids have learned to take what they need from various members, but that they should contribute more time and energy to the community. When she raises this concern at community meetings, the parents balk, she says. They say they don’t want to have to nag their kids to take care of yet another set of responsibilities. Susan Murphy has objected, saying that the chores would be between the community and the kids, not the parents and the kids. But she hasn’t convinced the parents of this, at least not yet.
While there is no ideological “party line,” environmental stewardship is a stated principle of the community. But even this principle was never clearly defined. It was intentionally left vague, says Peter Murphy, so the community could interpret it as it wished, over time.
The residents of Cantine’s Island are diverse in some ways, including age and sexual orientation. But in other ways, they are homogeneous. Aside from a few children adopted from Latin American countries, the residents are white. Some people of color have been interested in the community, but none of them have moved in. “Saugerties isn’t a diverse community, and that may have stopped some of them,” Wendy Weinburd surmises. Others speculate that minorities may be unable to afford the financial commitment involved. And the residents are all white collar, including seven therapists, two nurses, two teachers, a doctor, and two attorneys.
What the residents looked forward to most when they moved in was the day-to-day contact with their neighbors. This dream has been fulfilled for the most part.
Hirsch wanted to have kids drop in informally. She and the children “take apart old, mechanical things, you know—broken tape recorders, telephones, stuff like that, and fool around with the insides of them, and make them into things. They can come and go...it’s very fluid. That for me was a draw, and in fact, it’s worked out.” Hirsch says this has not been so true among the adults. “We thought we would interact more. We hang out after meals, the way you do in college. [But] sometimes everybody is so busy that you don’t see each other for weeks. That happens surprisingly much.”
When Susan Murphy’s father was very sick, he lived with the Murphys for some weeks, and then he died. “Everybody just came. They were watching to see when the hearse left, and after the hearse left, they just came. And we all sat out here. We took a photo portrait of my father, and put it on a chair with some flowers,” she remembers, “and we just had a spontaneous little gathering.”
“You run into peoples’ neuroses. The honeymoon’s over,” after three years of community life, says Compain, a doctor of nutritional medicine. But he is clearly in love with the community. “We take for granted, like in an extended family, that someone is going to help me out, and not in order to be ‘nice’—it’s not that. This is what we all expect from each other,” he says. Compain says he has no interest in ever leaving Cantine’s Island.
A few of the residents describe themselves as solitary types. Susan Murphy is among these. But she does not see it as ironic that she was drawn to cohousing. “I chose cohousing very deliberately ... to counteract that tendency to isolate myself,” she explains. “Everybody’s quite aware that I will stay in my house, alone, for days or weeks at a time. But [my neighbors are] there, and I belong here. This is our home in the most deep and profound sense of the word. There’s no place else in the world that is ever going to be this to us.” Sklaroff likewise says, “I tend to be more of a loner, but what I have read about cohousing, and I think it’s true, is that it works for people who are very gregarious, and it works for people who tend to spend more time alone, because you can choose when you want the social interaction, and it’s readily available.”
Sklaroff, an elementary school teacher who is currently a stay-at-home dad who home schools his eight year-old daughter and cares for his five-year-old son, most looked forward to his kids having a safe environment and a built-in social life. As we chatted, a neighbor came by to ask, “Are my kids here?” She’d left them playing outside, and had told them to go to another neighbor if they needed help. They had, instead, turned out at Sklaroff’s house, with his son.
The relationships at Cantine’s Island remind Sklaroff most of those he’d developed when he’d worked on theatrical productions in the past. “We created this community. There’s a strong element of creativity. It’s that kind of intense, communal, creative project.”
Cantine’s Island seems to be a mecca for the ten kids who reside there. Amelia Sklaroff is eight-years-old. “I love it here,” she says. “I have so many friends, and stuff to do.” Amelia says her friends include adults, “like Ruth [Hirsch]. She invites us in, lets us eat her food, and play with her cat.” When pressed for anything she doesn’t love about the place, Amelia says, “when my friends lock me out of their houses because they’re mad at me. I keep banging on the door until they open up, and then we make up—usually.”
But cohousing is, apparently, not so popular among the community’s teenagers. “Teenagers hate cohousing because everybody knows their business. Everybody watches their comings and goings,” says Susan Murphy. One sixteen-year-old stayed at home for a week while her parents went on vacation. So many of the residents checked in on her that she finally put a note on the door saying, “to neighbors: Please don’t knock on the door. I’ll call you if I need any help.”
Cantine’s Island has attracted a number of single older adults. “I far prefer it to an adult community,” says Mary Ellen Eardley, a widow in her sixties. Her house has a traditional feel. She sits in her recliner, there is wall-to-wall, freshly-vacuumed carpeting, and everything is in its place. Eardley likes the group meals and living around children. “They can be annoying,” she admits, “but they can also be a source of pleasure. They’re interesting and fun. Last night, Stephanie [another resident who is a single mom] didn’t get back in time to drive her daughter to a music lesson, so I did. I do things like that quite frequently.” Eardley doesn’t feel taken advantage of. “There may come a time when I may need some help. People have cycles in their lives...,” she explains. For Eardley, Cantine’s Island is home. “They’ll have to take me out feet first,” she says emphatically.
New challenges have arisen to replace the challenges of design and construction that ended in 1997. The community has bought an additional parcel of land and plans to build three or four more houses there. And the first resale house is now on the market, by a resident who is marrying out of the community. The house can legally be sold to whomever the selling resident chooses, although the community has the right of first refusal. Some residents are concerned that the potential buyers may not be the kind of people they would have chosen. But no one wishes that the community had the right to reject a given buyer. They seem to trust that things will work out, as they have so far at Cantine’s Island.
Anyone interested in the possibility of joining the community at Cantine’s Island should call Michael Compain, chair of the membership committee, at 246-3271.
The Cohousing Network’s Web site is www.cohousing.org.