“You start with the dream, you gather the people.” This is how Pat McAulay describes creating a co-housing community in Durham, North Carolina, with her wife, Margaret Roesch. It’s believed to be the first 55-plus co-housing community in the United States for LGBTQ folks and allies. Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Pat and Margaret, from the latest DWG/APM radio broadcast special, “The Way We Live.” Plus, my conversation with Barbara, a Village Hearth resident who happens to be heterosexual. Romantic love was not on her agenda when she relocated. Then along came Mark and …

Haven’t had the opportunity to listen? Read the transcript — and leave a comment! What are your thoughts on co-housing communities … and on serendipitous love?

PAT

We spend a lot of time at the beach with our friends and enjoy that communal spirit there with everybody, working together and having fun together at the beach, and early on in our relationship, we thought, wouldn’t it be great if we all live together and take care of each other when we get older and and that’s like what every lesbian says, everywhere, we found. And so as the years went on, we started working on plans and how we would build things and such. And it wasn’t practical, because builders won’t build a one off with four pods and a common space.

And then eventually somebody came up with the idea of shared housing. And we looked at that for a little bit, and as it got nearer, and we actually retired, and we were sitting across the table from people who were talking about doing this, it was like we are not compatible to live with this couple in a home and share a kitchen space and a common space. And so then it was, what’s the next thing? And so eventually we made it to co-housing, and it was like, this is perfect. So we were living in Durham, and Durham has had about eight co-housing communities at the time. And all but one were multi-generational communities, and the multi-generational communities would be okay, but their homes are all two story, and we knew that we were wanted some place that was going to be accessible as we aged.

The co-housing community that was more senior oriented is further out in the country, and that was not really appropriate for what we wanted. We wanted to be a certain distance from downtown Durham so we could continue to participate in city activities as we age.

 MARGARET

So we decided that the only way we could stay in Durham, which we loved, and have what we wanted, the 55 plus community that was going to be accessible, was to try to find some place where we could build our own, which we said, This is crazy. What are we going to do this?

PAT

When you research co-housing, you know there’s a national association that’s what people do, is build their own communities. You start with the dream, you gather some people. You know, you work on the financing and the development. And what we found as we went to a conference is that people who tried to do it themselves took years and years and years, but once they brought in a professional who’d done it before as an advisor, then they were able to make progress. So we were like, We know nothing, so we need to start with having professional help. And that was, that was a godsend. The project would have died 10 days in.

LAURA STASSI

I love that expression. You start with a dream, you gather some people. I mean, that’s …

MARGARET Absolutely.

LAURA STASSI That should be our motto for life, right?

MARGARET

So, so we found our development consultant and talked to her in person and got her on board. We did a lot of touring around in different co-housing communities around the country and found the design of one that was going to work and that this is the design. He had already built one of these in another state, and we walked through it, and we said, if we could just have this design in Durham, this would work perfectly, so that this is the architect we chose, and the development consultant worked us through every step along the way.

 PAT Because we’re 55 plus community. We’re covered under Hopa, the exception to the fair housing laws for older people. And so under Hopa,  we have to have at least 80% of the homes with somebody over 55.

 LAURA STASSI If I wanted my grandkids to visit, my teenage grandkids, could they stay for three months? My parents lived in a place, and it was very specific.

 PAT We lived in Florida for eight years, so we know sometimes there are minimum ages and restrictions on the length of time, and we don’t have that. What we were trying to be as flexible as possible about is the idea of grandparents actually having to take custody of grandchildren. And we wanted that to be okay.

LAURA STASSI Oh, that’s beautiful.

PAT We didn’t want people to have to move out just because their life situation changed.

 LAURA STASSI Yeah.

MARGARET Can I just say a little bit about moving in during the height of the COVID lockdown? Not only did we not use the common house for the first year for any group activities, because we didn’t know yet how we didn’t have the vaccine yet, and we didn’t know how contagious COVID was. We were all using masks still, and we did everything outside. We used the terrace and our front porches and the sidewalks to do anything that we did together, and we all these people didn’t know each other, plus Durham was shut down, the restaurants were closed and museums were closed, the stores were on shortened hours, and people had moved here from places they’d lived for 20 and 30 years or longer and came to a city they couldn’t learn. It was really, really hard on those folks who had moved from where they had known to a place that was just shut down and people that they barely knew. And it was a tough, tough year. I mean, we made it. We were very creative. But, yeah, it was. It was a hard, hard first year.

 LAURA STASSI So tell me, what are the obligations of the residents in a co-housing in your co-housing community,

MARGARET Well, it’s you come to this community to be involved and to want to know your neighbors, and you also are committed to spending time every month to being in involved in meetings, and to being involved in some work teams, and you have to be on a cook squad, whether you cook or not.

LAURA STASSI So once a week, the community comes together and the house and eats dinner together.

MARGARET AND PAT Yeah, mm-hmm.

 MARGARET Everyone puts in some time on either intellectual work or physical work. You may spend some time helping to spiff up the common house, or you might do some weeding, the landscaping crew, or you might help with some emails, or you might be on the membership team and help do welcoming for an open house.

PAT We’re self-governed, and so we make decisions cooperatively, and while legally, we’re an HOA and follow under North Carolina condo law, we decided to make every homeowner a member of the board.

MARGARET

It’s been great at this age. I mean, I’m turning 70 this year, and I have learned more personally about myself. I’ve grown as a person these five years that I’ve lived here, and it’s been fabulous. And 26:26

I have two sisters who say that they’re feeling dull in their older age, and it’s like, Man, I’m just energized from living here. And it’s like, I can’t wait to see what happens the next day and the next year.

 PAT

The big thing about Co-housing is that you come into it wanting to have your neighbors back. And with that, then comes the idea that  you aren’t lonely. I mean, you can choose to hole up in your house, if that, because we have a lot of introverts, and introverts need their time. But they also need people, and so we have that at our disposal here. It’s very easy to, you know, find somebody to do something with, or find somebody to talk to about something right here in the community. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have friends out in in Durham too, but it’s just very nice to have such close neighbors.

and the availability and people. People offer to teach how to do things that other people don’t know how to do. People will say, Hey, I’m going to, you know such and such downtown at the library. Who wants to come along with me? It’s, it’s just really easy.

 MARGARET Pat’s a real introvert and I’m such an extrovert that it’s such a good place for a couple like us, especially with my mobility issues, because I don’t drive, is that I can get the people time that I want on a regular basis, you know, many times a day when I want to be in, you know, interact with someone. And Pat is, is wanting to have hours to write or read or whatever in the house that it’s perfect if I was in a regular apartment or regular, you know, single family home, I would be so depressed and so isolated. I think my quality of life would be so diminished. So this is really it’s keeping me so much healthier mentally and physically.

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BARBARA I was at a party in Cambridge, and a friend came up to me and said, I hear you sold your house. Where are you going next? And I said, I have no idea. And she said, I’m going to a co housing site in North Carolina. Why don’t you check it out? So I did.

 LAURA STASSI Okay, and what was your relationship status before you moved to Durham.

BARBARA I was married in 1983 and divorced in 1987. I moved to Durham in 2019 so I had been divorced and single for quite some time.

LAURA STASSI Did you have any serious relationships during that time?

BARBARA Yes, I had several serious. I even moved to California to be with someone in San Francisco in 2008. But that didn’t work out. So I was back in Massachusetts by 2010.

I was very lonely in Massachusetts and had learned that that loneliness was a very serious health risk for people who lived alone and were my age. I was looking for support, community, and connection, and it seemed to me that a co-housing situation would provide those things, and it does, in fact, in spades. And I was living with my son in Massachusetts, and that was not going well, and we both really wanted to get away from each other, and so I was really casting about for a new direction. And I’ve always been a risk taker, so jumping off without a safety net seemed to me to be a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

 LAURA STASSI You weren’t looking for romance. Tell me what happened.

BARBARA Well, all of us used the same man of all trades. He was truly an expert at designing gates or building backsplashes or fixing your HVAC or whatever. And I eventually hired him to put in a set of cabinets and to put a vent over my stove in 2020. I really liked him. He everybody really liked him. He’s a really popular person here. And a year later, he showed up at my door with a bunch of his azaleas and asked me out for coffee.

He was 63 and I was 69. And then we went for a picnic. I made all this wonderful stuff, chicken and chicken salad and all kinds of great stuff. And I was so excited to be like out with this guy that I left it all in the trunk, and we walked, we walked to the picking site and spread out the blanket, and there was nothing to eat, but that was okay.

 LAURA STASSI And what was his relationship history?

BARBARA Oh, he had dated a lot, but he hadn’t settled in with anyone. He was a widower. He had been married. His wife passed away. They divorced first, and She passed away in 2005. 10:02

so he had been alone for quite some time, but he had, he had taken dancing lessons and tried to meet somebody that way, and he’d done all kinds of things. He’s very handsome, and I’m sure he had a lot of bites.

We had been dating for about a year, and I think I said, you know, we really ought to move this to the next stage. And he said, Great, let’s live together. Why don’t you come to my house, or I can live here in your little one-bedroom unit of 650 square feet. He had a three- bedroom house. You know, his children had grown and moved on. So we moved there and then a year, almost a year later, my best friend at Village Hearth said, I’m moving back to Dayton to be closer to my family. And I said, Can I buy your unit?

I really wanted to get back to co- housing. I wanted to be around people who would provide support, and I wanted to provide support to them. But I didn’t want to leave Mark. So it was a matter of persuading him to sell his large home and move back here, which turned out it was a very good financial decision for him, so it wasn’t difficult to make the case.

 And it’s really funny, there was a marriage here at Village hearth about two months ago. I had always secretly thought we’d be the first couple to get married at Village Hearth, but Mark has never mentioned it, and so I’m not mentioning it either.

LAURA STASSI that’s a very traditional viewpoint, I think.

BARBARA It is an extremely traditional viewpoint. And If I were to mention it to any of the other women around here, they’d jump on me, I think. So it’s just between you and me. (laughter)

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