East Bay Cohousing - Berkeley/Oakland/Emeryville/SF

Temescal Commons

Temescal Commons cohousing is a small Christian community in Oakland, California. We seek to create more simplified, integrated lifestyles, to care for our neighborhood and our neighbors, and to appreciate and steward God’s creation by using well the resources we have. To further these goals, we designed our physical site with community and sustainability in mind, using environmentally-friendly building materials and conservation technology and creating shared yards, gardens, cooking, dining, and laundry areas.

Our project originated in 1996, when a group of Rockridge United Methodist Church (RUMC) members began talking about living together in north Oakland. In the fall of 1997, we bought the 11,300 square foot lot, and soon thereafter, completed the project’s design in collaboration with architects from The CoHousing Company. The site consists of a small cluster of nine housing units that includes an 1880s two-story house, which has been rehabilitated into two flats, as well as new construction consisting of a single-family unit, a duplex, a common house with an upstairs flat, and an existing triplex on adjacent property.

The detail design and construction process took approximately two years from the point of approval by our local Planning Commission to move-in. Throughout the planning, design, and construction process, the group came together for periodic workdays to demolish old structures, clear the lot, and renovate the old house. Each home is now owned as a condominium and a Homeowners Association assesses monthly dues to cover common area maintenance, utilities, and long-term replacement reserves.

The community includes singles and families, owners and renters. Our common life is anchored by two shared meals each week, monthly workdays, and bi-monthly all-community meetings. Owners also meet every other month and serve as the Association Board. We’ve found that our proximity to each other creates opportunities to gather for prayer or conversation and help each other in daily life. In these ways, we find God to be at work among us, nurturing and deepening our faith.

More about the community on its website

As of September, 2009, a studio apartment is available for rent in the community. Details here (EBCOHO free membership and MeetUp login required)

Page title	Most recent update	Last edited by
Fort Awesome	November 27, 2011 12:35 PM	Raines Cohen
Summer Sublets	May 11, 2011 4:13 PM	Raines Cohen
Doyle Street	May 5, 2011 4:34 PM	Raines Cohen
Golden Gate Cohousing	January 11, 2012 10:59 AM	Jeff Billings
Eastlake Cohousing	March 31, 2011 10:46 PM	Raines Cohen
Oakland Morehouse	June 9, 2011 10:35 AM	Oceana Lott
MultiCoho	December 27, 2010 9:22 PM	Raines Cohen
Churcha Soul	August 5, 2010 2:41 PM	Raines Cohen
Berkeley Town House	July 10, 2010 8:08 AM	Betsy Morris
Group Houses and Co-ops	December 24, 2011 12:37 PM	Raines Cohen
Established Cohousing Neighborhoods	November 28, 2011 2:51 PM	Betsy Morris
Forming Groups	November 28, 2011 6:05 AM	Betsy Morris

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Berkeley, CA

Founded Oct 22, 2003

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Imagine lively people-scaled communities dotting the San Francisco Bay Area - places co-created by their residents for raising kids, for retirement, for growing food or simply living well by sharing more. The Bay Area already has ecovillages, and cohousing neighborhoods, resident-owned housing cooperatives, and group houses -- real world places where we can live more sustainably through a more cooperative way of life. You can have both privacy and community when you know your neighbors on purpose, in day-to-day relationships based on common vision and values.

East Bay Cohousing (EBCOHO) is a Bay Area-wide MeetUp. We connect a wide variety of kindred spirits and resources. We support individuals wanting to learn more, forming groups looking to create community together, and members of existing communities. We are mostly in the East Bay and San Francisco; others are from the North and South Bay, Los Angeles, Nevada, and other parts of the US and Mexico.

There are over two dozen cohousing communities in the greater Bay Area, (more cohousing in Oakland than any other U.S. city). There are also dozens of other emerging and long-established intentional communities. EBCOHO members have recently bought or rented homes in cohousing neighborhoods and cooperatively owned apartment buildings in Berkeley, Emeryville, Oakland , Pleasant Hill, Grass Valley, Santa Rosa, and Nevada City. We have members living in Swan's Market Cohousing, Triple Point, Temescal Commons, Berkeley Cohousing, Parker Street Coop, Berkeley Town House, Addison Court Coop and established forming groups like East Lake Cohousing (formerly North Oakland Cohousing).

Extra bonus for 2012: The National Cohousing Conference is coming to town in June!

We host EBCOHO events for members, and link you to other events featuring a global network of friends and allies: pioneers in cooperative culture and sustainable communities: urban farmers, affordable housing developers, green builders, and creative visionaries in the movements for more open, user-friendly and collaborative technologies, economies, and governments. There's a global reinvention of communiies going on - both on the ground and online -- and the Bay Area is one of the world's epicenters.

EBCOHO has more events than our MeetUp-based home page can show fully, so please click on our Calendar to see more. Join for free to get involved! There's no charge for basic membership, but supporting members get discounts on some events, including socials, and workshops, cohousing books, and Cohousing Coaching.

Join us for an orientation, for social events, discussion, talks with exciting speakers, and hands-on workshops to learn the tools for developing good group relationships, and the real estate development process.. Find others who share your vision for supportive neighbors. Do it for yourself, for your family, for your parents, do it for the Earth! Make 2012 the year to deepen YOUR community connections.