For Claudia Ruffle, living in a cohousing community was a lifelong dream. She longed for connection with people who shared her values, particularly around concern for the environment. But as an introvert, she found it hard to meet people on her own.
Cohousing, a form of collaborative living that originated in Denmark, provided “a structure where I didn’t have to be outgoing and could still get the benefit of getting to know people,” said Ruffle, 72, a former substitute teacher and administrative secretary. “It compensated for my lack of outgoingness.”
So she was among the early supporters of what was envisioned as Connecticut’s first cohousing community. After more than a decade of planning, the project, called Rocky Corner, finally broke ground in 2018 on a 33-acre plot in Bethany, a suburb of New Haven. Ruffle and a friend contracted to purchase one of the attached housing units there, and sold their home in New Haven in anticipation of closing in 2019. But their closing date kept getting extended. And then members of the community were told that the project was having a cash flow problem.
“We thought, Oh, OK, we will give them all of our money for our unit with the understanding that once we can move in, our unit is paid for,” Ruffle said. But instead, the entire project went into foreclosure. And Ruffle’s dream — and finances — were dashed.
“That money is now gone and there’s no way for us to retrieve it,” she said. “We lost about $170,000. And we both have very low incomes. Ever since, we’ve been living in not good circumstances at all.” Members of Rocky Corner offer varying views of what exactly went wrong. But in general, most agree that the increasing complexity of the project proved more than the group could afford or manage.
“Mistakes were made all along the line by all parties,” said Dick Margulis, a book designer and editor who, along with his wife, was among the community’s earliest organisers. What happened at Rocky Corner is not a reflection of the viability of cohousing in general, said Karen Gimnig, the interim executive director of the Cohousing Association of America, a national nonprofit that supports newly forming and existing communities.
There are about 170 established cohousing communities in the United States, according to the Cohousing Association. There are about 30 cohousing communities in California and five in New York State. In a cohousing model, residents own their own homes, but share common spaces — a structure aimed at fostering connection and community through collaborative living. “Projects that get under construction, like any other development project, it’s imaginable that things could happen,” Gimnig said. “But it’s really, really rare.”
The association always advises people planning such communities to partner with experienced cohousing developers in order to minimise their risks, she said. Though cohousing projects are typically built on properties that have municipal water and sewer, she said, the Rocky Corner project was a rural property and involved reserving a portion of the land for farming.
Only about half of the planned 30 housing units were close to completion when Ion Bank, in Naugatuck, recently took possession of the property through a limited liability company. The bank submitted the sole bid of $6.9 million at the foreclosure sale in November. Ion filed for foreclosure in 2020, with outstanding loans on the project totalling about $6.7 million.
Housing Enterprises, a consulting firm in Enfield, helped the group win a $2.6 million housing grant from the state to make some of the units affordable.
“A lot of people lost money,” said David Berto, the president of Housing Enterprises. “There was a whole group of people who put in money to buy the land, and some of those weren’t homebuyers. They were just people who wanted to help, including me. We have all lost money and that’s just the way it is.”
—The New York Times
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