First stop: Boulder, Colorado

Chrysallis Labor Chart

Prepping for the Boulder Food Rescue 

Bike Parking

  It's been a long trip so far.  A 16-hour drive from Austin to Boulder, with sandstorms, snow, tumbleweeds, windmills, and cows that we could never quite manage to get on camera.  Boulder is a small, flat town with lots of bikes, bordered by huge snow-topped mountains (being Texans, we got really excited by those!).  We first got B-roll of the town, then headed to Nomad Cohousing to meet our first subjects.  Nomad is a community of about 30 people, 10 of them kids, nestled on an acre of land in the middle of the city (such as it is). We got some fantastic interviews with the residents, including a popular architect, two sustainability coaches, and a whole bunch of kids!      We learned that the central tenet of cohousing is the architecture: houses are commonly arranged facing each other around a central courtyard, with a common house for gatherings and weekly meals.  This facilitates interaction and creates an old-style neighborhood with a ton of community and sustainability benefits.
  Next, we visited Masala co-op, a lovely little mixed-age house with chickens and gardens and a great mix of people, and then captured an interview with Wonderland Hill founder Jim Leach.  Wonderland Hill is the largest cohousing developer in the United States.  Jim gave us some great information on the history of the movement and the work that's being done today.  The next day, we went to a gathering at Chrysalis co-op which benefited the Boulder Food Rescue (a completely awesome organization which collects extra food from grocery stores and brings it to co-ops and homeless shelters) and then headed out to LA.
  After this first section of the trip, the question I have is - if community living has so many benefits, why don't more people live in it?  Co-ops and cohousing have been around since the 1960s and '80s, respectively, but they're still a pretty small proportion of American housing, especially when compared to communal living in other countries.  If you think about it, living in community is far more natural than living alone.  Maybe it's our American mindset of individuality and entitlement - definitely community living does require work and sharing.  For me, the most important question of this film is how to bring more people to this amazing way of life.


-Sara