Brooklyn Co-Housing in the Times

I've been hearing about this Brooklyn co-housing group for quite a while. I've even announced info sessions on this blog. Well, it sounds like they've made a lot of progress in a fairly short amount of time.

So what is co-housing? A group of utopian Brooklynites have pooled their money and bought a nice piece of real estate in Fort Greene (a former church that was set to be transformed into condos). They plan to turn that property into a cooperative housing situation sort of like a kibbutz. Actually, it's more like Food Coop but it's a life coop—a village where neighbors share meals and hang out together and let their children roam  wild and free. They also have to make decisions about just about everything together. This will be the first co-housing project in NYC. Here's an excerpt from the NY Times:

They envision an arrangement called “cohousing,” a place where neighbors sit down to share meals several times a week, where children roam freely from home to home, and where grown-ups can hang out in a communal living room. They plan, in short, to create a village within a single development, and their chosen site is in the middle of a tree-lined brownstone block in Fort Greene.

The group, which has been incorporated as Brooklyn Cohousing L.L.C., is in contract to buy an unfinished project known as Carlton Mews, whose developers had planned 40 high-end condominiums. The developers drew up plans for apartments surrounding a common courtyard, with the units to be built in an long-abandoned Episcopal church, its former rectory and a new building with a facade that mimics the stately town houses on the block.

Brooklyn Cohousing has bought the rights to the site, the plans and all the city approvals that the developers spent two years amassing, including a go-ahead from the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The group hasn’t settled on a project name yet, but it plans to build more modest apartments than the original developers intended and to fill them with families whose lives revolve around the courtyard and 6,000 square feet of common space where residents can cook together, play together, do woodworking or take an art class together.