Occupy a Co-op

Alternatives to Single-Family Living

by Jennifer Farley and photographs by Deborah Degraffenreid, December 28, 2011

Sharing anything you call home with people outside your family quickly becomes a fairly radical act when multiplied often enough. It’s not for everyone, of course, but there are those who love it. Consider, for example, having the option of dining casually with friends, weeknights at 6:30 pm—but having kitchen duty just once a week. Or for a very reasonable and predictable monthly fee, a shared expanse of land, but freedom from mowing, gardening, trash hauling, and snow removal, plus septic and well maintenance. But perhaps most of all, enjoying an enhanced sense of tribal belonging, with this affiliation available in doses small or large.
The Hudson Valley has boasted an array of creative and spiritually based group residences for many years. However, a new phalanx is emerging, secular in flavor, with sustainable and cooperative living as its common denominator. Lean economic times, smaller families—to include a widening cast of permanent singletons—plus bargain-priced older buildings or grant-subsidized supergreen new construction, have combined to sprout collective habitats with avant garde social structures.

This month, Chronogram looks at Friendly Acres Homeowners Association in Kerhonkson and Common Fire Housing Co-op in Tivoli, alternative residential arrangements that may be the future of group living.

Friendly Acres: Like a New York Apartment Condo in the Country
“Every time I walk into this house, I say ‘Thank you, Mom,” says Judy Swallow, a psychotherapist who has lived at the Friendly Acres bungalow community since 2002.

Initially, Swallow rented her winterized 1950s cottage, which she purchased a year later. Like all Friendly Acres homeowners, she owns her roughly 1,000-square-foot home and its footprint independently, plus a share of the eight acres the community holds jointly. Formally established in 1999, the Friendly Acres Homeowners Association (FAHA) functions much like an apartment condo in the country.
The opportunity to buy at Friendly Acres “came along at the right time in my life,” says Swallow. She’d been married for 19 years, and together with her husband owned a home in New Paltz, but she needed her own space, free of his clutter. “With the money my mother left me, I was able to buy this place outright, and it saved our marriage!” exclaims Swallow. Swallow loves the age range and mix of occupations represented by the residents of Friendly Acres’ eight bungalows. She visits about once a week.