Co-Housing More Family-Friendly Than Suburbia, Says UF Researcher

April 11, 1997

GAINESVILLE — The great postwar suburban experiment that was supposed to be a haven for family life may have failed American children, says a University of Florida researcher.

A new housing trend with old roots is replacing the isolation and alienation of suburban neighborhoods that cut children off from responsibilities to the adult community and turned them into self-absorbed teenagers, said John Scanzoni, a UF sociology professor and family expert.

“Many parents who, in the 1950s, believed this kind of living was ideal for giving children every possible advantage — wide-open spaces where kids could grow and thrive, far from the pitfalls of the city — ended up finding adolescent society new and shocking,” Scanzoni said. “They had inadvertently spawned a monster in the womb of suburbia.”

In striving to give baby boomers every blessing imaginable in the newly affluent age, postwar suburban parents unwittingly relieved their offspring of community responsibility, said Scanzoni, who presented his findings during an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle in February.

“Adolescents invented a society of their own, with their own language, dress and music,” he said. “Most of all, their chief duties and responsibilities were to one another rather than to parents, teachers and clergy.”

Collaborative communities, or co-housing, began in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and emerged in the United States in the 1970s. Scanzoni said co-housing may be better suited than suburban neighborhoods for nurturing children, helping overburdened parents and fostering a sense of community in today’s post-industrial age. Santa Rosa Creek in California and Westwood in Asheville, N.C., along with other examples in North Carolina and Georgia, are among about 300 of these housing developments that exist today throughout the country, he said.

The houses are set close together and near the street; parking is allowed only along the edge of the development to encourage residents to walk instead of drive through the neighborhood; and neighbors sometimes share meals and child care at meeting halls and other common areas.

But what really distinguishes them from other developments is that residents are — and are often required to be — willing to participate in community life. At the same time, each household retains its own privacy and independence, he said.

“A major feature of these housing developments is that residents spend a lot of time in group sessions negotiating problems and figuring out how children can contribute to the community,” Scanzoni said. “Older children may help the elderly with household chores or babysit youngsters of single parents, not for pay but as part of community service.”

Suburban neighborhoods were better suited to the 50s and 60s, when most women stayed home to care for children, he said. But with single-parent families comprising a fast-growing trend and the prevalence of both spouses in two-parent families working outside the home, Scanzoni said, today’s parents need all the help they can get and co-housing goes a long way toward providing that help.

For instance, in one of these new communities, Santa Rosa Creek in California, researchers found children could knock on neighbors’ doors and be welcomed, Scanzoni said.

By relying on a wide range of adults besides parents to help children, these new developments actually draw on older roots, when children believed they were part of something bigger than themselves, Scanzoni said. Growing up in urban American neighborhoods full of European immigrants before World War II meant identifying with one’s own ethnic group, he said.

“One feature of those earlier urban neighborhoods was front porches,” Scanzoni said. “As families sat in front of their homes, people would stroll by and stop to talk, sometimes having a drink or a smoke, just to be neighborly. It’s that kind of social and spatial setting that co-housing developments try to emulate.”