HEARTWOOD COHOUSING - FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What’s the history of Heartwood Cohousing?
Ours is a history of a dream, lots of patience, persistence, and working together, and the eventual realization of that dream.
In 1993 there was a group of people living in Boulder, CO who were trying to create a cohousing neighborhood there. Because real estate prices were so high in Boulder, several of the households moved to Durango to try their luck at creating cohousing here. Durango Cohousing was born. Of that original group from Boulder, Ted and Martha Pasternack, Gail Davidson, and Lynne McGee now live at Heartwood.
In January of 1994, Mac and Sandy moved to Durango to join the Durango Cohousing effort. Shortly thereafter, we held a retreat to agree on a vision for Durango Cohousing. Out of that retreat, two visions emerged. One was a vision of creating a spiritual community and the other was one of creating a community which welcomed diverse expressions of spirituality, but not a spiritual community, per se. The first group continued on as Durango Cohousing and did not end up building a cohousing community.
Mac spent the rest of the year researching how to create a cohousing community and in 1995 founded San Juan Cohousing based on the second vision. We held monthly potlucks, created a master plan of the development process, recruited members, created our vision and values and goals and agreements on decision making and conflict resolution, kept informed via Pen Pal letters, created a development budget, created site selection criteria, attended the national cohousing conference, visited other cohousing communities, researched the county land use approval process, and hired a lawyer, engineer, and architect. We were rolling. Our dream of creating community was taking shape.
As it turned out, site selection was a huge effort. We looked at hundreds of pieces of land. We pored over county records, met with developers and other land owners, and followed up on any lead, no matter how promising. We just couldn’t find a piece of land that met all of our criteria: affordable, could pass the county approval process (adequate water, sewer, access, and compatibility with surrounding properties), within 30 minutes of Durango, good solar access, tall trees, nurturing, and good gardening potential. We were getting a bit discouraged. We decided to remove tall trees as one of our criteria.
And then in 1997, at long last, we found our land -- 361 acres of irrigated pastureland and pinon, juniper, and ponderosa forests. It even had tall trees! The only problem was that it was far more land than we could afford. We decided to go for it anyway. Mac and Sandy bought the land with the plan to sell about 100 acres to San Juan Cohousing and the rest to outsiders. As we moved ever so slowly through the county land use process, a plan evolved to develop a second phase and thereby keep all of the land. At the end of 1998, after an incredibly arduous struggle, we received county approval for our community.
Along about that time, we changed our name to Heartwood Cohousing. We had always known that San Juan Cohousing was just a temporary name and that we would choose our permanent name once we had found land. We wanted the name to come from the land. It certainly did.
Through 1998 and 1999 we held numerous design workshops as we collaborated with our architects to create a site design, private home designs, and a common house design. We had originally planned to sell lots to members and then have everyone build custom homes, but we soon learned that production homes would be far less expensive than custom homes. We had several members who still wanted to build custom homes (mostly natural strawbale or straw-clay homes) so we offered either a production home or custom home option. What we’ve ended up with is an amazing collection of environmentally friendly, solar homes -- but I get ahead of myself.
We finally broke ground at the end of July 1999 only to find ourselves knee deep in mud as August proved to be the wettest August in recorded history. We persevered and completed construction of the production homes in early 2000. Most of the custom homes were completed in 2000 with the last completed in 2007. With the false threat of Y2K behind us and the dawning of a new millennium, our first move-in was on January 22, 2000.
Many of us thought that developing Heartwood Cohousing was to be the hard work and that once we moved in, we’d be able to relax and savor the fruits of our labor. Oh, how naive. There was still plenty of hard work ahead -- relationships to forge, a community culture to co-create, and barren, dry, brown clay to landscape.
And now, some years down the road, the hard work continues, but so does the savoring of the fruits. We enjoy close relationships with our neighbors, our children run free, and lovely trees, shrubs, and gardens now thrive. We often compare the birth of Heartwood to the birth of a baby. The development process was the (very long) pregnancy and our community is now a small child. We are a happy and healthy child, but we still have a lot of growing to do.
With each new person that moves into Heartwood, we receive an infusion of creative energy and passion and so we continue to grow in unforeseen directions. It’s a beautiful unfolding.
In the near future, we can make out on the horizon more and more Heartwood food production as we begin to realize the full potential of our greenhouse, gardens, and pastureland. We see new energy flowing in as Phase 2 is developed and new community members join the dream.