First cohousing development in Grass Valley begins to sprout

Logging on a wooded corner at Freeman Lane and McKnight Way in Grass Valley is expected to start in April, and construction on a cohousing project there could start in late spring or early summer, development spokeswoman Rhonda Herrin said Tuesday.

Exact starting dates for the work depend on the weather. The plans call for selective cutting of trees.

Members of Wolf Creek Village, the first cohousing project in the city, said they are looking forward to completion of the energy efficient development in mid-2009.

About 75 future residents gathered over the weekend to break ground and bless the land where they will build between Freeman Lane and Wolf Creek. The project of 32 mixed-age residences and a separate building of 30 condominiums for adults is set on more than 8 acres of woods between the Kmart shopping center and the Raley's-JCPenney center at the southern edge of the city.

Designers Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett plan to use materials and technologies that will allow residents to reduce their use of energy.

Nevada City CoHousing, which McCamant and Durrett designed and opened in December 2005, recently won the Silver 2008 Energy Value Housing Award from the National Association of Home builders.

"Wolf Creek Village cohousing may surpass the number of awards that Nevada City Cohousing will receive," McCamant said at Saturday's ceremony.

Another cohousing community has formed in Truckee.

Cohousing is a concept McCamant and Durrett learned about in Denmark while studying architecture and brought to the United States, using it to form neighborhoods throughout California and across the country. Cohousing brings community residents into designing and operating their community through a sometimes arduous process of collective decision-making.

But residents say the trade-off is a closely knit neighborhood in which people interact with caring and concern, neighbors help each other and children and the elderly can interact on a daily basis.