Tanzer: Necessarily cooperative housing – lessons from Helene, Grace, and more

Comfort stations were established in Cedar Key days after Hurricane Helene came ashore and stayed until potable water and sewer systems were reestablished | Photo by Kim Tanzer
OPINION
BY KIM TANZER
On September 26, 2024, millions of Americans were catapulted out of 21st-century America and back to the Stone Age. Category 4 Hurricane Helene cut a swath a hundred miles wide and more than 700 miles long, changing forever the lives of those living as far south as Tampa Bay and as far north as North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. Its storm surge, winds, rain, and the resulting flooding and landslides wiped out homes, livelihoods, and entire towns in a matter of hours.
Many of us in Gainesville have close connections to Cedar Key and have watched or participated in its brave, determined recovery. I have also closely followed the stories of friends around Asheville, NC. For those saying, “They should have known they were in harm’s way,” let’s be clear: no storm surge of this magnitude had impacted Cedar Key in more than a hundred years, and no one in Asheville had any reason to anticipate that a hurricane would devastate their communities 500 miles from landfall and 2,100 feet above sea level.
What I have found most instructive in the aftermath of Helene is the resilience of those affected, along with the degree to which priorities have readjusted. In a flash, concerns about where to sleep and finding food and drinking water, along with toilets, bathing, and laundry facilities, replaced all non-essential activities. The foundation of Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” collapsed overnight.

Nearby restaurants and businesses helped as they could. Robinson’s Restaurant, spared by the storm, offered free food to those in need. | Photo by Kim Tanzer
In Cedar Key, as soon as the island was deemed safe to reenter, a command post was established at City Hall. Here volunteers gave out free food and water and directed professional and volunteer efforts. Local churches and charities supplemented these efforts. Very soon, comfort stations with porta-potties and handwashing stations appeared every few blocks. They were not convenient for many, but they were accessible to all. Without a functioning potable water or sewer system, these were welcome beginnings.
During this time, streets were cleared of fallen trees and debris of every kind. Electric service was restored to many, which required cutting trees off lines, repairing poles and lines, and reconnecting service to individual structures. Cell phones provided the only form of connectivity in this remote location, as wired connections were mostly damaged or destroyed.
Mountains of debris were collected from streets and dredged from the marina—the town’s main hub of tourism and industry.
The town’s grocery and hardware stores suffered catastrophic damage, making it difficult to get life’s basic necessities, including those needed for repair and rebuilding. The post office and library also were badly damaged. (The nearest town is 30 miles away, with only wetlands and wildlife preserves in between.)

All residents shared two communal service areas, each containing showers and laundry facilities. | Photo by Kim Tanzer
Next came trailers holding clusters of showers and laundry facilities. There were two stations on the island, serving those among the town’s 700 residents who still had a place to live.
Within a month, essential structures were being rebuilt and a few restaurants were reopening, providing both food and livelihoods to locals. Later, the U.S. Post Office sent a truck to serve as a mobile post office so residents would no longer need to make their way to Chiefland to conduct basic mail-based business.
This sequence—restoring safe housing and providing access to food, water, toilets, showers, laundry, and essential supplies, while clearing an unfathomable amount of debris—was replayed across the southeastern United States, and it is ongoing.
What I have seen in Cedar Key and in the Asheville area is the transformation of thousands of comfortable individual lives, relying on their own basic necessities, into neighborhood or city-wide “campuses” depending on shared resources. Whereas on September 25th, individual homes provided life’s necessities for sleeping, eating, toileting, bathing, laundry, and collecting mail, two weeks later these functions were redistributed across entire towns. Hundreds of towns participated, by necessity, in cooperative housing.
Like many, I have been deeply appreciative of my own good fortune, having been largely spared the life-altering tragedy of Helene’s destructive forces. It has also focused my attention on the shared resources we all need and the various ways we deploy them daily. While the residents of Cedar Key embraced cooperative housing services out of urgent necessity, many people routinely share basic functions of housing for more pragmatic reasons.

At GRACE Marketplace, signs direct residents and volunteers to various housing services on the campus. | Photo by Kim Tanzer
For instance, college students living in dormitories also share toilets, bathing, laundry, and dining facilities. They use a common post office and WiFi connections. Basic services like the library, health and fitness facilities, entertainment, and, of course, classrooms, are all shared.
Those living in assisted living complexes, too, share dining, bathing, mail, laundry, recreation, and rehabilitation facilities. They also share staff, equipped to help with daily needs from eating to bathing to healthcare and everything in between.
In Gainesville, GRACE Marketplace provides temporary housing for the unhoused, but this campus, too, is much more than a dormitory. It also provides dining, laundry, and bathing facilities, along with a pharmacy, basic care for beloved pets, a free used clothing shop, a computer lab, and a garden.
Gainesville and Alachua County have several single room occupancy (SRO) facilities in the community, with more underway. These, too, typically include shared necessities serving individuals in bedroom/bathroom living units.
One interesting national effort that has caught my attention is the work of the Office of Charles F. Bloszies FAIA, which develops tiny house villages built of repurposed shipping containers. While this idea is not new, his introduction of the campus concept, which includes bathroom/shower trailers (like Cedar Key) and a food truck, is new to me. This seems a very practical improvement to a needed housing type.
Newly sensitized to the fragility of ready access to life’s necessities, I have begun to re-explore the idea of cooperative housing, sometimes called “co-op housing.”
Gainesville has at least one branded co-op housing project, and it has a helpful website. It is a group of 24 small homes (800-2,000 square feet) arranged around a common building that includes a kitchen and a swimming pool and play area. The community’s goal is to share scheduled communal meals, along with some maintenance projects. In building social connections, they hope to help each other manage life’s challenges—childcare, sick family members, etc. As described, it seems designed to work as a close-knit neighborhood, one in which people agree to be good neighbors in advance, by contract. This seems to be another good addition to Gainesville’s housing options.

Looking from the Common House toward single-family residences in the Gainesville Cohousing Intentional Community. | Photo by Kim Tanzer
I have come to realize that throughout our lives, much of our housing is necessarily cooperative, whether due to a natural disaster, a downturn in personal fortunes, or the need to share basic housing functions during college, illness, or near the end of our lives. Using this expanded definition, most of those reading today have likely lived in cooperative housing, and many of us will in the future. The self-reliance we have come to expect, where everyone’s home contains all of life’s needs and wants, may well become the exception, due to rising population and costs, not the rule.
Cooperative housing, it seems, is one of life’s necessities.
Kim Tanzer lives in Gainesville. She is a former UF architecture professor, who was also dean of the University of Virginia School of Architecture.
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Tried reading her puke again and again but my eyes keep bleeding. So painful to try to read her ramblings. Blah blah blah housing blah blah blah. Just asked the lady who brought into her home a homeless man and got beat up for taking to long getting a pizza. That co-op didn’t work out so well.
LMFAOOO
Nope, just nope.
If you’re going to make a point, make it quickly. I stopped at “Stone Age”.
I appreciated this article, but the last couple of sentences seem to me to contain an alarming nudge toward accepting cooperative housing for the masses: “The self-reliance we have come to expect, where everyone’s home contains all of life’s needs and wants, may well become the exception, due to rising population and costs, not the rule.”
Cooperative housing is essential during some life seasons for some people, but making the leap that most of us will be living that way rather than in individual homes in a self-reliant way sounds like the globalist goal: You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
I think it’s important as a society to pursue responsible independent home ownership, holding that up as the norm and the goal, rather than normalizing dormitory-type living for adults as the expectation.
Concerned, the “self reliance” you aim for is an illusion and all of us are more dependent, not less so, than earlier humans on society, though all of us are almost by definition. From learning the benefits and tricks other humans have mastered to collective food procurement, even our earliest ancestors were social animals from the get-go. Just because we have a lock on our doors does not mean we were or are the creators and masters of our homes. Think about it and how many others contribute to it’s functioning and even protection, and of course the jobs out in society we depend on to pay the bills.
Stay with a relative or friend
Wonder if those areas of California that have been impacted by the wildfires, home to the largest liberal population in the country, as well as the largest homeless population in the country, will be willing to welcome such communities in those areas that have new vacant lots?
Not saying to take advantage of such a tragedy, just pointing out the hypocrisy.
The wealthy will purchase that prime land. Never miss an opportunity. Look at the aftermath of the Hawaii fire.
Sure, why not figure a partisan angle on other people’s misfortune. It’s the MAGA way!
Why not? Partisan politics is a primary contributor.
Thanks for playing.
Is partisan politics the primary contributor to California having the world’s 5th largest economy, it’s being a net source for federal tax receipts to prop up our net federal tax drain red states, and a large part of the Biden/Harris vote counties which were responsible for 71/61% of US GDP compared to the Trump vote counties which eeked out 29/39% of US GDP? Or do you just use that tool for ankle biting your betters?
My better? Now that hurts.
Doubtful. More likely the drive and determination of entrepreneurs, (especially those in IT), agriculture, (which doesn’t get much support from tree huggers), and a wide variety of other sources of revenue. They do have the nation’s largest population, of both legal and illegal immigrants, as well as the nation’s largest homeless population. You also forgot to mention they had a budget deficit. All that revenue and they still fall short on wildfire mitigation.
I guess they’re like Gainesville, all of those taxes but little to show for it.
I agree there should be more of this as an OPTION. It has been done and just doesn’t use costly advertising like a Del Webb 55+ community. Monastic living has also been an option for the religious. If you can do that for the laity without breaking HUD civil rights laws, that might be a good step — to share common costs/spaces while still retaining personal costs/spaces.
Young adults not in college but seeking to escape dysfunctional parents’ homes might be attracted to owning a unit, while sharing common costs among others under 55. Housing needs innovation just like other industries do.
Social engineering should never be imposed by architecture, full stop.
Unless it’s voluntary.
Man, this board loves wallowing in hate, and now “puke”.
What has worked for humans to the point where we inhabit and survive in all of earth’s environments, including the harshest, is socialization, i.e. cooperation, not the competition and conquest popularized by writers and movies.
There was a modest crowd of several hundred humans in a very cold and raw – for Floridians – Depot Park Saturday, and if that had been another species, including our favorite, dogs, dollars to donuts violence would have broken out every few minutes over territory or food. The humans Saturday? Typical peaceful day and crowd, helpful hands and approving glances for the kids, smiles and waiting in line for food.
That’s our norm when not listening to the s..t stirrers of history and helps explain 70 years without another World War – knock on wood and fingers crossed.
Kim, a lifetime expert and student of human living arrangements writes to investigate recent and current communal resources for those in trouble and approvingly, one senses, as would most humans. Except here on this board of ugliness. That what should make us lose our lunch.
Kim is very strange
Thank you Kim for another fascinating look at urban planning.
Interesting. Communal living comes into play when people are desperate, true. A group of like-minded individuals may choose to engage in communal living. However, unless there is an emergency or desperation, these type of like-minded groups take time to form and communal living won’t happen well by signing a contract to enter a community.
Dorm living in college is a great example of “not happening well.” Anyone who has lived in dorms with communal bathrooms and kitchens may know what I mean, unless they are outliers, especially when a random roommate is assigned
As an aside, I’m surprised the author didn’t mention the dorm-style living some professionals in San Fran utilize
Unmarried people would voluntarily live with shared expenses if given that option more. Many rent rooms out of homes with shared common areas, utilities split — if not sharing food, etc too. Why not buy instead, pay a mortgage and gain equity, assets? Retirees do it.
Any word on the potholes? That is far more pressing than a roof over your head and adequate food supply. POTHOLES PEOPLE! Focus on the problems!
I almost forgot to mention (Cause I have potholes on the brain so much), once the Bronze Aged One deports 20 million illegals and all the boomers die there will be abundant housing for the younger generations. Hurry up Boomers and move along.
Lets hope it’s 30 million
Thank you for your informative article. I will look up your link to tiny houses as these are essential. However, i have noticed in your articles that you do not recognize the incredible expense of most of the housing in Gainesville and other towns and i heard that cohousing development is expensive!! Many, many people in Alachua County are poor through no fault of their own.
Do not the senior housings such as The Village and Oak Hammock in Gainesville, already do this.
Thanks or another outstanding article, Kim. Gainesville’s only co-housing community has been a big success. Many of our friends live there. -GT