Katie McCamant loves knowing the names of all her neighbors in her Nevada City, California community. She knows their kids. She feels comfortable calling neighbors for a ride to a doctor's appointment or to break bread.
"I just love walking home and knowing my neighbors and watching the kids grow up." said McCamant. "It's not just me out there alone. That is, I feel really supported by my community."
McCamant is president of CoHousing Solutions, a sustainable neighborhood consulting firm. She is a licensed architect and coauthor of Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. She's one of the co-founders of her neighborhood, Nevada City Cohousing, a community of nearly 90 people among 34 privately owned townhouses
Nevada City Cohousing has a large community building with a kitchen and dining room for common meals, a laundry room so you don't have to have your own, and guest rooms that you can check out for relatives or friends who visit and share equipment like lawnmowers.
McCamant has lived in cohousing communities for three decades. Nevada City Cohousing is one of more than 45 projects she's served as a consultant or co-founder. Two of those projects are in the Nashville area: Germantown Commons, completed in 2015, and Burns Village and Farm, a multi-generational cohousing village and agrihood west of Nashville, with 36 homes and a small farm.
Agrihoods, agriculture-based neighborhoods, and cohousing are alternative sustainable real estate development models. Although agrihoods and cohousing sound like new ideas, these concepts are rooted in traditions people practiced in villages and farming communities ages ago.
The Cohousing Movement
According to the Cohousing Association of the United States (CoHoUS) 2024 Annual Report, there are approximately 200 cohousing communities nationwide, with new ones forming every year.
McCamant serves on the advisory council of CoHoUS, which states that "cohousing is not a financial or legal model but rather a descriptive term that emphasizes the active participation of residents in everything from design to governance."
When some people think of cohousing, images of hippies in communes come to mind. Those communities were closer to a form of cohabitation. With cohousing, homebuyers maintain private property and individual lives. They are also more strategic and emphasize "intentional" real estate development. They are buyers with a shared vision of what makes a community work.
Cohousing has become a market-friendly alternative to the gated and planned communities that exploded in the 1990s. That's when homebuyers flocked to model homes, where intent meant choosing solid-surface or granite, hardwood versus carpet. These planned communities featured shared spaces like country clubs, fitness centers, soccer fields, and playgrounds.
Meanwhile, McMansions sprouted in sparkling new neighborhoods with boutique shopping and dining options. Town Centers replaced the post-World War II shopping malls. Larger homes with open floor plans housed theater rooms, play rooms, gyms and spa-like en suites. These developments sold the idea of community but delivered luxurious isolation.
"Social isolation is the way we build neighborhoods today," said McCamant. "In our car-dependent societies, we've just basically designed community right out of our lives."
By community, McCamant means more than potlucks and HOA meetings. The core cohousing principles are shared resources, collaborative decision-making, and community engagement. Some of the key benefits of cohousing are reduced waste and energy consumption.
The Rise of Agrihoods
Burns Village and Farm is a cohousing community centered around an agrihood. The project is in the early stages, but plans include "a multi-generational neighborhood where residents enjoy privacy in their own homes as well as supportive and congenial relationships with neighbors. The neighborhood will support a small sustainable farm operated by professional farmers who provide produce to community members in exchange for this support."
"We don't have to be farmers to live on a farm," said McCamant. "But we can support a farmer by clustering our homes and making this land available so a young farmer can get started. Because a huge issue in the farm industry is people, young farmers, can't afford the land to get started."
Key sustainability components of an agrihood include local food production, reduced carbon footprint, green building practices, and collaborative communities.
Agrihoods have been loosely defined as everything from a neighborhood with a garden to large developments with acres of community-supported farmland. In a 2018 ULI report, Agrihoods: Cultivating Best Practices, agrihoods are defined as single-family, multifamily, or mixed-use communities built with a working farm or community garden as a focus.
Daron "Farmer D" Joffe, founder of Farmer D Consulting, was a contributing author on the ULI report.
"What's really important is that we source our food locally, that we support local farms. I'm not even talking about just from a wealth perspective. I'm just talking about from a local food shed, thinking about regional food systems," Joffe said. "I think it's just a good idea to not rely on food being shipped from all over the place. And so the idea of, like building resiliency, regional resiliency by having local food systems is a really important thing that every community, every region, should be looking thinking about."
Whether agrihoods, farm-to-table, or farmer's markets, Joffe said there are many benefits to creating systems to source your own food. In his book Citizen Farmers: The Biodynamic Way to Grow Healthy Food, Build Thriving Communities, and Give Back to the Earth, Joffe encourages people to develop a more holistic, community-minded approach to how our food is grown and how we live our lives in balance with nature.
Challenges and Considerations of Agrihoods and Cohousing As Affordable Real Estate Development
When it comes to affordable housing, cohousing, and agrihoods are viable solutions. However, affordable housing projects usually require subsidies.
"I've worked in this space for a long, long time. It's increasingly difficult to find that subsidy money," said McCamant. "And so give me the money, and I've got many communities all across the country that would love to have some more integrated affordable housing."
Joffe has been a consultant on many agrifoods and acknowledges that most are places like Serenbe, Georgia, beautifully designed communities home to the affluent.
"You got a lot of these higher-end communities, but our path has always been and continues to be food justice, food equity, and food security," said Joffe.
"We need more developers who are building neighborhoods already, to kind of look at these models," said McCamant. "I think we've seen that there is a need, there's a desire, and even if it's at market rate prices, there's a market that is looking for something out there that really is not being built today. So the next step is really to get more developers involved."
MaCamat believes many home buyers would love to live in more economically diverse neighborhoods than current financing models allow them to do.
"If there was funding to help subsidize some units and integrate that into a market-rate development, you'd have a lot of interest," she said.
Agrihoods and cohousing can address market-rate or affordable housing development and promote economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
"We have really good research that social connection is as critical to your longevity and your health, as almost anything else you can do so," said McCamant. "There's really good data now about the importance of social connection in our health and our longevity."