PLAINFIELD — It’s been an artist’s home and studio. A restaurant and bed and breakfast. And for the past couple of decades, it’s been the country residence of a Boston architect.
Now, a group of like-minded individuals and couples want to make it their forever home.
The former Plainfield home of American painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish is being eyed by a group of Upper Valley residents to become a “micro-cohousing” residence in a project that seeks a new residential model by combining common social ideals with economic efficiency.
“If you have $300,000 to $400,000, there are a lot of really nice options about where to live” in the Upper Valley, said Josiah Proietti, who is spearheading an effort by a group to buy The Oaks, the 45-acre former Parrish estate on Freeman Road near Plainfield Village, where the group would reside among the property’s three houses. “But there’s not a lot between the amount of money you need to get from housing assistance and the minimal amount of money you need to live here.”
Born in part from a lack of affordable housing in the Upper Valley, the project at The Oaks would be just one of many cohousing setups across the U.S. — 288, according to the Cohousing Association of the U.S., including nine in Vermont and one in New Hampshire.
The practice takes as many forms as there are cohousing communities, but a working definition is a cluster of homes inhabited by people around a common ideal or purpose who share space and resources in order to lower their living costs and reduce their environmental footprint.
Although cohousing has echoes of the counter-culture communes of the 1960s and 1970s, proponents argue that the concept is closer to a condo or homeowner’s association where people share costs in maintenance for the community — plowing, for example — but also meet as often as once a week for a meal together in a common space and where there might be a community garden and recreation area.
And unlike a commune where everything from income to one’s belongings can be pooled for sharing, cohousing allows members a large degree of autonomy and independence, according to advocates.
“It’s a collaborative, cooperative housing situation and different groups organize around different principles but fundamentally it speaks to the desire and intent to be on good terms with each other with private homes, relatively small, a modest number of families … you don’t have to be best buddies,” said Rich Brown, a software engineer and Lyme resident and founding member of a cohousing effort in Lyme that’s been in the works for years
The Upper Valley already has one established cohousing community: 270-acre Cobb Hill, formed in 2003, consisting of 23 families in Hartland who, in addition to their day jobs in professions ranging from teaching to medicine and small business, also run a farm that produces cheese, maple syrup, honey and 425 pounds of shiitake mushrooms annually.
Brown’s effort in Lyme would be a community attached to 100 acres around Loch Lyme Lodge. It’s been snarled in red tape for more than 10 years and has run into resistance from some residents who worry it would too radically change the town’s aesthetic. At present, the cohousing project could realistically build four homes under current approved zoning, far fewer than the nearly two dozen 4-acre lots its backers have envisioned.
The lack of affordable housing is a chronic issue in the Upper Valley, but it has become acute in recent years as an improving economy has pushed home prices out of reach for many first-time homebuyers. The median sales prices of a home in New Hampshire now stands at $300,000, up 5% from a year ago, according to the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority.
Renters have it even tougher.
New Hampshire’s Grafton County has one of the highest rental rates and lowest vacancy rates in the state, the HFA reported last week. The median monthly rent for a two-bedroom unit is $1,217 per month, the fourth-highest among the state’s 10 counties. At the same time, Grafton County’s vacancy rate, at about 0.3%, is tied with Rockingham County as the second-lowest.
Proetti sees the Plainfield cohousing project as a solution, at least for the handful who buy in.
Proietti has been organizing public meetings — he’s held three so far — to preview his micro-cohousing vision for the former Parrish estate. He said so far the project has sparked enough interest that it already has a “core” group of six people who have signaled strong interest toward the 10 to 12 adults he eventually hopes to attract.
The Oaks, owned by Boston architect and urban planner Sy Mintz, is currently listed for $999,000, down from $1.29 million when he put the property on the market nearly two years ago. The three structures on the property include a main house, a guest house and Parrish’s studio. They include 16 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms and seven kitchens.
Although largely habitable, Proietti estimates it requires more than $300,000 in “deferred maintenance” costs to bring the property and one of the buildings, which contains six rooms and “is not move-in ready,” up to snuff.
At a presentation to a group of about eight people Wednesday night in a downstairs room of the Howe Library in Hanover, Proietti laid out the economic rationale behind the micro-cohousing project. He noted that a person needs to earn $22 an hour to afford the rent on a two-bedroom apartment in the Upper Valley — New Hampshire is in the top 30% of most expensive states to live in the country — but that is more than double the maximum a person can earn before being eligible for rental assistance.
“But most of us are making between $10 and $22 per hour, so we believe there is a huge market of people living here,” he explained. Based on that income level, a payment of $500 to $600 per month — less than half the Grafton County average — is “what we would call affordable housing.”
Proietti, an assistant director of residential education at Dartmouth College who lives in the East Wheelock House residence hall, said that the rooms at The Oaks would cost between $30,000 to $85,000 each. Occupants would buy “shares” that would represent either partial or full payment based upon their financial resources and how much they wanted to spend. He said that so far the “core” group has about $440,000 in assets to put toward the purchase — he estimated they will need at least $500,000 down toward the purchase price in order to make the project financially viable.
“Five-hundred thousand dollars is the basement” amount, although the greater the principal the less the group would have to spend in financing.
In order to illustrate how the share-purchasing program works, Proietti brought a board game he and a friend designed to the meeting where people role-played purchasing the rooms and seeing how by committing different amounts of money their individual costs to buy in would change and what that meant for the project as a whole.
The more people who would be able to swing the full payment up front would in effect underwrite those whose financial circumstances would make their purchase more challenging, he explained.
The concept, known as “redistributive ownership” — in which people pay according to their means, with some paying more and others paying less — Proietti acknowledged “breaks people’s minds from a capitalistic standpoint.” But the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to financing a living space “we reject outright.”
Several of the people who attended Proietti’s presentation expressed enthusiasm for the micro-cohousing idea and planned to organize themselves for a tour of the property.
Megan Chamberlain, a summer camp director who currently lives in a “tiny house” in Sharon, said she thought cohousing offered a “more financially viable” option for her than traditional renting.
“The model of these communities where people bring their gifts, whether it is financial or some kind of other skill, is what entices me,” she said.
The same notion was expressed by Alanda Wraye, a retired chaplain who only this spring moved from to White River Junction from the Seattle area, where the cost of renting is “horrible,” she said.
Wray said she has experienced a residence hall-like living situation because she returned to college at age 60 to finish studying for her degree. Attracted by the “affordability and quality of life and also the whole social aspect of it,” Wray said she also liked the idea “that everyone doesn’t have to have the same income level” in order to live in a cohousing setting.
“I was going to cash in my CDs, but a little voice was telling me not to do it,” Wray said. Instead, she said, “I can buy my room outright.”
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
