Blog Post

How Building Diverse, Inclusive Communities Can Help Lift Children Out of Poverty

The New York Times August 1st issue of The Daily focused on “friending bias” and the ways in which growing up in a diverse, inclusive community—along with other factors—can help kids growing up in poverty achieve “upward mobility” across class, race, and other lines.

The piece focused on a recently published study in the scientific journal Nature that examined how various social capital indicators and their ability to foster economic mobility and improved outcomes for children growing up in poverty were impacted by forming friendships across class lines.

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Time Magazine Declares Portland One of the “World’s Best Places” for 2022

It’s not everyday that your hometown gets called one of the “World’s Best Places.” Though, if you happen to call Portland home, it can feel that way. Add Time to the list of national and international news outlets swooning over the Rose City. 

We may have had our fair share of challenges over the span of the last couple of years, but we’d like to think that Portland is still one of the best places to visit or call home, and Time seems to agree. On July twelfth Time published a story by Sucheta Rawal about the welcoming attitude and overall awesomeness of the City of Roses—home to Portland’s newest cohousing community, Cathedral Park Cohousing—where “all are welcome.” 

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Rebecca is Preparing to Move to Portland

Bringing community together at Portland’s Newest Cohousing Community means different things for different community members. For some it will be a move across town into their first home that they own or a home where they can age in place, for others—like Rebecca—it means moving to a community they have visited and enjoyed.   

We are rapidly approaching a tipping point at Cathedral Park Cohousing, bringing together members from across Portland, across the Pacific Northwest, and beyond. As Rebecca prepares to move to St Johns she is doing her homework. She is making sure that she is ready to take advantage of all that this amazing region has to offer.   

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In a prior repost from our guest tour of the CohoUS blog, we talked about the benefits of working in close partnership with a developer that has experience developing cohousing. In this post we want to talk about working with an architectural firm that understands how to build community in addition to buildings.

We have been fortunate to work with two architecture firms since launching this project. Both immediately understood that we wanted our physical surroundings to help us live together as a community. In our initial stages, we worked with Johnston Architects from Seattle, WA to get our first set of drawings. Eventually, our developer, UD+P, introduced us to Mahlum Architects of Portland, OR. For the past year or so, we have been working with Mahlum to help solve the challenges brought on by rising Portland construction costs and the need for more density due to the high cost of land in our desirable urban location. We quickly learned that Mahlum also brings a suite of skills and experience around building welcoming spaces for diverse communities, and we realized this partnership was a perfect fit. Mahlum’s “inclusionary design strategies” will ensure a design that will help us to build and maintain our community connections, be accessible to a wide range of ages and abilities, meet our budget, and maximize the use of our sloping urban site.

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Bringing Ingredients Together

There are very few foods that are as easy to customize with what you have on hand, that are as nourishing and comforting as a good bowl of soup. Maybe that’s why soup is such a big crowd pleaser at community meals in cohousing communities across the globe. At Portland’s newest cohousing community, Cathedral Park Cohousing we’re still forming community, but we’re already cooking—using the broth of our values and our shared vision alongside spices, herbs, vegetables, and other ingredients to create community among our members. See what we did there with the metaphor? 

There are about as many recipes for soups as there are stars in the nighttime sky. But, you don’t need a soup of the day cookbook for the entire year to make a pot of delicious satisfaction for yourself, your family, or your entire community. You just need a reasonable number of ingredients that play nice, a big pot, and some basic skills.   

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By: Abby Braithwaite, Cathedral Park Cohousing Neighbor—Previously Posted on the Cohousing US Blog

The Benefits of Collaboration with a Developer with Cohousing Experience and Expertise

In this article, we would like to talk about the benefits of working in close collaboration with a development group that has extensive experience with cohousing. For the development of Cathedral Park Cohousing, we chose Urban Development + Partners, a local Portland, Oregon firm. The committed hearts and minds of everyone we have worked with at UD+P have provided an incredible boost when obstacles have gotten thorny. Because they have worked with other cohousing groups, they understood what we are aiming to do immediately and intuitively, and their broad view of cohousing helped us identify where we can follow the traditional cohousing template, and where we have to tweak things a bit to make our unique vision become a reality. When it came to tweaking, their experience, professional network, and creativity have helped ensure we are creating a process that is efficient and accessible.

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Cooking up Spring Trifle

When people think about cohousing, one of their first thoughts is typically about food—community meals cooked by a rotating team of resident chefs in a big kitchen in the shared common house, or potlucks in the courtyard, with everyone bringing the best from their kitchens (or a loaf of crusty bread and a hunk of cheese picked up on the way home from work). 
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