Till Death (or Decorating Disputes) Do Us Part
By ELAINE LOUIE
Mendocino County, Calif. — Twenty years after they embarked on an experiment in communal living, the members of Cheesecake gathered for an anniversary celebration over Labor Day weekend. Nearly 100 people — the seven who live here full time, six who are here part time, and assorted children, grandchildren and friends, including Laura Hartman, one of the architects who designed the complex — spent two days barbecuing, talking, hiking through the redwoods and competing to see who could bake the best cheesecake. (The competition was in honor of the community’s name, which is derived from a loose translation of Casada, the surname of the family who owned the 20-acre property at the turn of the 19th century.)
The younger and more adventurous among them slept in tents or tepees in the meadow (Ms. Hartman brought her own pup tent), while older visitors bunked together in the residential buildings or stayed in hotels nearby.
It was a fittingly multigenerational celebration for an idea inspired by the parents of some of the original members, who became increasingly isolated with age: no one should have to grow old alone.
In 1994, The New York Times reported on how those members, or “partners,” as they called themselves, had settled into their first year of life as a community (“Retirement? For 11 Friends, It’s Off to Camp”). It was one of a number of such experiments, known as cohousing communities, that were springing up around the country at the time, based on a Danish model developed in the 1960s.
The original group of 11 included four married couples and three women, all in their 50s and 60s, each of whom agreed to pay a monthly fee for the mortgage, taxes and insurance on the 6,000-square-foot complex, as well as a small daily usage charge for utilities whenever they were in residence (food and phone bills were handled individually). Bedrooms and some bathrooms were private, but nearly everything else was shared, an arrangement that seemed feasible given the longstanding friendships of most of the members, who had started a cooperative nursery school for their children when they lived in Southern California in the 1960s. Still, there were three buildings in the complex (two that contained common areas and private apartments and one where residents could pursue their hobbies), because, as Ms. Hartman said in the 1994 article, “Everyone under one roof made people nervous.”
How did the experiment turn out? On the 20th anniversary, the consensus was generally positive.
As Helen Papke, 84, observed, it has been a lesson in patience. “When it’s good, it’s so good,” she said. “And when it’s bad, it’s so bad, the angst and argument we have with each other. But we have a conviction to work it out — and we will.”
Dick Browning, 78, whose wife, Louise, died in 2007, was more effusive. “I love it,” he said. “I love the community.”
Of the original 11 members, seven are still here, although apart from Ms. Browning, no one has died. (One couple and one woman left for personal reasons.) The community has taken on new members, so there are now 13 altogether.
No one seems lonely, but some of the residents aren’t quite as energetic as they once were. Take Daniel Myers, a retired lawyer who moved in with his wife, Jill, in 1993, when he was 60. Now, he said, “I can’t get on the roof to get the leaves off, and I can’t chop wood.”
And needless to say, there have been plenty of compromises along the way. Even something as simple as cutting down a tree or buying a new dishwasher requires a consensus, or at least the agreement of three-quarters of the residents. And getting that many people to agree on anything can take a while.
Ask Sophie Otis, a clinical psychologist who is now 77, who had to lobby for almost two decades to get rid of the tree obstructing the view from her window. In 1993, when she moved in, it was only six feet tall and she could see around it. Ten years later, at 30 feet, it was starting to block the light. But it wasn’t until January, when it was 45 feet tall and threatening to fall down, that the community agreed to remove it, Ms. Otis said.
“They finally cut it down this year, not because of my problem with the view,” she said, “but because it was blocking the light and was a hazard in lots of ways.”
In matters involving the environment, Ms. Otis said, the community is divided into two camps: “Some are Druids, those who don’t want to change anything, and some are foresters, who can cut the brush back. Jill and Gaile are the Druids.”
Gaile Wakeman, a retired pediatric physical therapist who is 76, concurred. “I don’t want a single tree to be cut,” she said. “I don’t give on this. You cannot replace a tree that’s been here 300 years.”
Or as Mr. Myers said, “When you think about taking down a tree, we’ll have a fuss over it.”
The other thing residents tend to disagree about is money. And as is true elsewhere in the country, Ms. Otis said, “conservatives are those who do not want to spend money, and liberals do.”
But while these distinctions may resemble those between Republicans and Democrats, Ms. Wakeman noted, Cheesecake members lean to the left politically. “We’re all pretty liberal,” she said. “A Tea Party person would never live here.”
Most of the rules they established at the outset remain in place. Private quarters may be decorated according to personal tastes, but in communal spaces the majority taste rules. No one can inherit a membership in Cheesecake; members’ children must apply to join the group like anyone else. And these days, buying in to the community costs about $25,000 upfront, plus a continuing $500 monthly fee and an $11 daily charge for food staples, electricity and Internet use.
But time and infirmity have altered at least one rule.
Initially, members agreed that if one of them became seriously ill, he or she would have to go elsewhere for care, because Cheesecake wasn’t designed to function as a hospital or hospice. But when Ms. Browning, a retired school administrator, had open-heart surgery in 2003 and learned she had cancer the following year, the group changed its collective mind.
During the four years she was sick, when she wasn’t in the hospital or at her son Jonathan’s home in San Francisco, she was at Cheesecake. And when Mr. Browning, a retired school principal, brought his wife back after her 2003 surgery, residents began appearing at the Brownings’ door within the hour, he said: “They asked, ‘Can I be the one to bring tea to you?’ ‘Can I bring flowers every day?’ ”
After his wife died, he said: “I’d be in my room, grieving and crying. But I wasn’t alone.”
Cheesecake was envisioned for happier times, but for some of its residents it also seems to have made the difficult ones more bearable. As Marco Heithaus, the spouse of the Brownings’ son Jonathan, said: “When you lose a person, usually you grieve for a year or two. But there was so much support, Dick came out of his shell in six months.”
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