*By "Lloyd Alter":http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/03/treehugger_welc_1.php of "Treehugger":http://www.treehugger.com* Watch this trend. Those of us approaching our "best before" date have to consider how we are going to live when we no longer can be completely independent. Toronto architect "Carol Kleinfeldt":http://kma.to/ proposed this idea a couple of years ago and it is happening now: people working cooperatively to develop modern communes. They don't have to be all fancy new construction; they don't have to be in the country; they do have to be people working together to pool resources, talent, and experience to live together and support each other.

It is sort of a focused cohousing project, a concept Treehugger has admired "here":http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/02/pss_cohousing.php and in other "posts":http://www.treehugger.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=cohousing&x=0&y=0. There are about a dozen co-operative housing developments for the elderly in development, from Santa Fe, New Mexico to St. Petersburg, Florida, a fledgling movement to communally address "the challenge of aging non-institutionally," said Charles Durett, an architect in Nevada City, California, who imported the concept he named co-housing — people buying homes in a community they plan and run together — from Denmark in the late 1960's." (Charles Durett and Kathryn McCamant "wrote the book on cohousing":http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0898155398/sr=8-2/qid=1141253704/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-2944001-6555152?%5Fencoding=UTF8). Syndicated from "Treehugger":http://www.treehugger.com