Wildfires and Ice Storms and Pandemics…Oh My!

My family lives with another family in a 2,300-square-foot ranch house. Altogether (and all together), there are seven of us—four adults, three kids—and our dog, Ginny Weasley. “We share everything but the bedrooms,” we tell folks when they look at us side-eyed. Well, almost everything. We co-own the home, and we share bank accounts for food and for house expenses. But our family finances are otherwise separate. We have our own vehicles, too, though we share as needed, and probably get away with one less car as a result. 

When my wife, Kate, and I were dating 20 years ago, she told me she wanted to live in an ecovillage someday. That was a non-starter for me. I like my privacy and as few people as possible telling me what to do. So began a pattern in our relationship: Kate, two steps ahead of me, dragging me to try the things I would come to treasure most—and then I get credit by writing books about them. That doesn’t seem fair to me, but Kate is happy with the division of labor.  

To be clear, we don’t live in an ecovillage. Just a quarter-acre lot on the edge of town. (And our first big vegetable garden won’t go in until spring.) But the Pattisons and the Neveses have been together now for the better part of seven years. So if not “village,” then what term best describes what we’re doing? We are a community, a word that has its roots in the Latin word for “common,” which itself implied the sharing of burdens. We’ve also blurred the lines of family in ways that are pleasing to me. When I tell my youngest daughter that we’re going on “a family hike,” she asks for clarification: just the Pattisons or everyone?

A More Resilient Way to Live

Our arrangement—two families, four generations total, living under one roof—is shockingly unusual in 21st-century America. (“So how does this work?” new neighbors will ask.) Yet, I wonder how surprised our ancestors would be by it, or even someone from a different part of the world today. Motivated by a shared heart for community, and in response to practical needs, we stumbled on an ancient arrangement that comes with its own challenges, yes, but also innumerable advantages. The events of the past two years have intensified the challenges a little, but they’ve also made us grateful for the blessings of living this way.

This being Strong Towns, let’s start with the financial stuff. My wife works for the state of Oregon, and I work for a nonprofit. Our housemates are both high school teachers: Elijah teaches Spanish, Emily teaches nursing. We live in a fast-growing town 45 miles south of Portland, Oregon. The housing market here is bonkers. Kate and I probably could have bought our home by ourselves, but we would have had almost no financial margin, a precarious way to live. Emily and Elijah grew up here, yet couldn’t afford to buy a home in their own hometown. Thus, buying a house together allowed both families to affordably achieve the goal of homeownership in a town we all love. 

In last week’s episode of the Upzoned podcast, I conservatively estimated that cohousing saved my family $24,000 in 2021. That was just looking at the mortgage, some renovations and maintenance we did on the house, and basic utilities. Undoubtedly, the real savings are substantially higher.

Not only do our families share the financial load, we share work around the house, too. We rotate chores so no one person gets stuck forever doing a job they dislike. Bigger projects are less daunting when tackled together, and they can even be a joy, too. Together, and with the help of dear friends who started a cohousing community right behind us, we’ve remodeled our kitchen and dining room, remodeled a bathroom, built a combination office-shed we call The Room of Requirement, dug trenches, re-landscaped the yard, planted a mini-orchard, built retaining walls, and more. 

We pool our energy and strength, as well as our skills, experience, passions, and opinions. Emily is trained as a nurse. Elijah speaks, like, six languages. My wife is a brilliant strategic thinker who knows how to solve problems and get things done. I’m, well, I’m a writer. Come the apocalypse, alone I’d be a sitting duck.

Speaking of which.

When the pandemic hit, we started a new house tradition: a Friday night dinner we call the “We Still Like Each Other Celebration.” I’ve sometimes compared living in community to being inside a rock tumbler. Life happens, the barrel turns, and we just click and clack against one another. It’s sometimes uncomfortable, and often vulnerable. But your sharp edges get softened, your roughest surfaces smoothed out a bit. And over time, you shine. Yet with the  pandemic, all of a sudden, we were all at home, all the time.

As stay-at-home orders dragged on in Oregon, there was a lot of potential for social claustrophobia in our house. We did okay, though. Over years of living together, we’d developed some good practices, as well as an enormous level of trust and affection. We felt fortunate to have each other in our pandemic “bubble.” The We Still Like Each Other Celebration—usually homemade pizza cooked in the wood-fired oven we built in our backyard (oh yeah, we built a wood-fired oven)—was a fun way to mark time during the pandemic. It also reminded us not to take our way of life for granted.

Gradually, the pandemic went from being foremost on our minds to being the backdrop against which the other dramas of life played out.

In the summer of 2020, the Pattisons and Neveses evacuated our house as wildfires crept dangerously close to our town and the air filled with toxic smoke. For a few days, the six of us (including a very pregnant mom-to-be) slept in my best friend’s basement in Portland. 

Then, one year ago this week, a once-in-a-century ice storm hit our area. It damaged or destroyed many thousands of trees. We stayed up all night listening to the sound of limbs cracking around our neighborhood, falling on rooftops, on cars, on our chicken coop. Green flashes lit up the evening sky as power lines around town were severed. When we ventured outside in the morning, the ground was littered with limbs; whole trees had been uprooted by the weight of the ice. We didn’t have electricity for six days. For the better part of a week, we stayed close to the fireplace in the living room. We kept our food refrigerated using ice that had fallen from our trees. We heated our water on the stove. We lit our house with candles and lanterns. With our neighbors, we began the process of clearing debris and assessing the damage.

Pandemics, wildfires, ice storms. My point isn’t that we had it bad the last two years. My point is that we had it better because we had each other. When we grieved, we grieved together. When we were anxious, we were anxious together. When there was a problem to be solved, or a decision to be made, we did it together. And when there was reason to celebrate—as there often was (Emily and Elijah had their first child in November 2020)—we celebrated together. Sometimes we just made up reasons to celebrate, doing theme days (Nerd Day, Costume Day, Crazy Hair Day) for no one but ourselves.

Physical Infrastructure Is Social Infrastructure

Here at Strong Towns, we regularly talk about how a city’s physical and social infrastructure contribute to, or help mitigate the effects of, natural disasters. 

For example, the way we build our cities both makes wildfires more likely and puts more homes in direct line of the fire. And if your city or state is spending so much money on new stuff that it can’t afford to maintain the stuff it already has, then you run the risk of bridges collapsing and dams breaking. Let’s call that physical infrastructure. 

We also talk about the social infrastructure—social capital, civic engagement, local economies that work for all, neighborliness, etc.—that makes a community more resilient when disasters do strike. I’m reminded of the title of Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Paradise Built in Hell, about the extraordinary ways in which people come together in crisis. If the last two years have taught us anything it is that crisis alone isn’t enough to make communities come together. The seeds of paradise have to be planted before hell comes; for good and ill, we reap in the heat of harvest what we sowed in the cool of spring.

But of course physical infrastructure and social infrastructure are inextricably linked. A town or city built in such a way that encourages walking, biking, and vibrant street life, is a city that leaves open the possibility of serendipitous encounters. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam has also shown that every 10 minutes of commuting results in 10% fewer social connections. It’s all connected.

Consider, finally, the four-step process we urge cities to use when considering how to spend public dollars:

1. Humbly observe where the people around you are struggling.

2. Determine the next smallest thing you can do to help address that struggle.

3. Do that thing. Do it right now.

4. Repeat the process. Again and again.

So even decisions about the built environment are rooted in the real-life struggles of real people in real neighborhoods. They aren’t abstractions. This is how a Strong Towns approach to “physical infrastructure” never strays far from the “social infrastructure.”

Strong Towns and Co-living

I bring all that up because every city makes decisions that help bring people together or keep them apart. 

For a time, while our friends were building their cohousing community across the property line, we had three families living under one roof. It wasn’t clear to us whether this arrangement was allowed under city law—frankly, we didn’t want to know—and so we tried not to draw too much attention to ourselves. And while it was easy for the Pattisons and Neveses to buy a house together 50–50, other places have complicated rules about home-buying with friends. In a recent article for Insider, Holly Harper talks about needing to become “tenants in common” in order to buy a home with two other single mothers in Washington, DC. (It was worth the effort.) 

Co-living, as it is sometimes called, isn’t for everyone. But I think it’s for more people than we might imagine. A Strong Town is one that makes room for a variety of housing types and living arrangements. In our case, co-living has allowed two families to become homeowners. It’s also given us the financial flexibility, the mutual support, and the extra energy we need to better serve each other, our neighborhood, and our town. 

There’s a famous scene in The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Man must push deeper into the dark forest. But they’re nervous. Locking arms, they give voice to their fears: “Lions and tigers and bears…oh my! Lions and tigers and bears…oh my!” Sometimes co-living is like that. We don’t know where the path ahead will lead us. But, locking arms, we resolve to move ahead, not merely “housemates,” but companions on the journey.

(All images for this piece were provided by the author.)

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