Do you ever ask yourself…Why do you want to do that?
Bet you do.
This afternoon that question crossed my my mind. It followed a twisting path to get there, but eventually it arrived, and I guess it brought a little enlightenment with it.
My friend and fellow editor, Tina, lives in a kind of extended family commune. Her relatives and SO think, often (from what I can tell) about how kewl it would be to acquire a good-sized chunk of land and build a compound on it, one with separate living a quarters for each individual or dyad or triad or whateverad, but with a community hall where people might meet and prepare meals together and party together and plan their shared trajectory together.
Meanwhile another pair of friends, La Maya and La Bethulia, occasionally voice the same thought: how amazing would it be to find a way to get a group of like-minded people together in a kind of shared housing?
And gazing into the past, some other old friends of mine — a couple and a single woman — came amazingly close to throwing in together with me to buy a gorgeously tricked-out triplex in Fountain Hills, a far suburb of Phoenix gifted with peace, quiet, gorgeous views, relatively cool temperatures, and proximity to the upscale environs of north Scottsdale. Fortunately, we couldn’t figure out the legalities of a tiny co-op — I say “fortunately” because we fell out and went our three different ways. But still…as ideas go, it was interesting.
So this thought proceeded to an e-mail to La Tina: why not look and see if those of us who can support ourselves remotely, through the various gigs and online businesses we exploit, could purchase some ash-covered acreage in Yarnell and build our own compound on it? The Yarnellites no longer welcome trailers, but…what about modular homes? I could, for example, live real happily in this little fella, especially if it had some room for a private garden or two around it.
And as I was shooting those links off to her, there it was, the thought occurring: Why do you want to do that?
Me?
Well, I don’t think I’m going to live all that much longer. And I suspect the time left to me is not going to lend itself to fully independent living.
I can’t take care of my house anymore. If this back pain doesn’t go away, and go away damned soon, I’m not going to be able to live here in my home. I can barely vacuum the floor, much less mop the grime off it. I haven’t dusted in weeks. It’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed in the morning, stumble around for a few hours, and then drag myself back into the bed, there to sleep all afternoon.
After I discovered that the blood pressure med is known to cause a) rashes like the nasty number that broke out on my face right after I started it, b) fatigue and listlessness, c) joint and muscular pain defining the excruciating agony that ramped up within three weeks after I started swallowing the stuff, and d) dizzy spells that make it dangerous (read “almost impossible”) for me to drive, I decided to experiment by quitting it. After all, I’ve had high blood pressure for several years and am not going to die in a month or two.
The rash went away within five days after I stopped taking the drug. So did the dizziness and light-headedness. Three weeks after quitting the damn stuff, the back pain is down to a .25 on a scale of one to ten. And the blood pressure is up to 130 to 140 on the home monitor, which means it’s over 150 on the higher quality units at a doctor’s office.
So I risk a stroke or I make myself so sick taking the damn stuff that I can’t take care of myself anymore and would just as soon shuffle off this mortal coil at the earliest possible moment.
That reduces the choices, de facto, to either
a) I get rid of Cassie, sell my home, and move into a life-care community where there’s someone to watch out for me, fix my food, and do the light housekeeping; or
b) I take my chances with death or permanent godawful disability.
But suppose the choices included c) I throw in with a bunch of other people who can more or less take care of themselves but can’t (or would prefer not to) go it completely alone? Now we have a whole new take on why do you want to do that…
Why would I want to live in a commune in Yarnell? Not just “it’s quiet,” “there are no effing cop and nooz helicopters buzzing the house every ten minutes,” “the air is clean(er),” “hawks and eagles and buzzards ride the cold columns of air overhead,” “the weather is never blinding effing hot,” “you can sleep with the windows open at night,” “you can hear the coyotes call in the middle of the night,” “there are no pawnshops for gangbangers and meth-heads to stick up,” “there are no cops to chase the gangbangers and meth-heads into your garage,” or any of that claptrap.
Put all the claptrap together and then add to it “my life might be shorter, but at least a fair amount of the last part of it will be better.”
Now you’ve got the picture. What is that you want to do, and why do you want to do that?
I discussed exactly this with my best friend tonight. She and two other couples of her long acquaintance are considering such a move into joint property-buying (one can’t stomach the term “commune”, so she refers to the housing as “noncontiguous duplex”). Being at a different stage of life, I’m drawn to the idea of having reliable childcare trade so that I can avoid that significant cost; my partner really wants to start a “real garden” and would welcome the opportunity to make it big enough to feed several households. Also, to be self-supporting (or communally interdependent) enough to preclude the necessity of full-time work for pay would be a blessing. Given the opportunity, I would rather work a part-time week and spend more hours on K.P. or in the nursery (babies or plants).
As Linda points out, the currently stylish term is “co-housing.” We might call it an “estate,” eh? 😉
The idea of a self-supporting or interdependent community suggests a kind of agrarian model: residents are full- or part-time husbands (as in a guy who “husbands the land”) and wives. How wonderful it would be if we could pull that off…and as full-time work goes away, to be replaced by low-paid piecework doled out over the Internet on a short-term contract basis, that may be the direction many of us will have to take. What you’re describing sounds like a small agrarian village.
However… All you have to do is talk to anyone who’s in an HOA (read Crystal on the subject at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff!) to see how difficult it could be to get a bunch of people to cooperate and then keep them cooperating.
Too, there’s the issue of what happens if a resident dies or wants to move? That was the one that stopped the three of us from buying the triplex in Fountain Hills. If, say, I died and my estate went to my son and he didn’t want to live there, then what? What if he wanted to rent it? What if he sold it to a meth dealer? Or a couple with three hormone-crazed teenagers? How would the survivors have any control over the co-housing arrangement’s future?
The idea sounds good, but it presents a lot of complications.
In regards to your blood pressure, go back to your doctor and tell him about your side effects. There are many different classes of blood pressure drugs with many different ones in the various classes. You don’t have to endure such bad side-effects.
Check out Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs. I believe they also discuss the best way to start treating HBP. I read it is best to start with a diuretic and add other classes as needed.
My husband’s doctor did this starting with a low dose of Mazide, the adding to more as they were needed to get his BP down where he wanted it. The doctor felt low doses of several drugs made for fewer side effects than a high dose of one. It worked for my husband. But his brother had more trouble and ended up taking 5 drugs. Everyone is different in their reactions.
Yeah, I warned him at the outset about my general hypersensitivity to drugs. Irbesartan has about the lowest rate of side effects of any BP drug out there….and remember, some of these phenomena occur in less than 1% of test subjects — often they occur in more of the placebo-takers than of the subjects who get the real stuff.
And there’s a limit to how much a doctor can be expected to believe. And when I pointed out the rashy, itchy patch of hives on my face, he told me he couldn’t see it and it was negligible. This is pretty much typical of the way doctors respond to my complaints about side-effects.
Gulping down five pills a day? Does anyone ever question whether this trip is really necessary? Or whether the metrics we’re given have any credible meaning?
Consider: by 5:30 yesterday evening, the systolic blood pressure was down to 108…without benefit of drugs. So…is my SP 108, 110, 120, 130, 140? An average of the above, as the Mayo’s website suggests? In that case it would be 121, dead normal. My DP is never above normal, always less than 80, no matter what figure appears on top. Do I want to swallow even one pill a day, to say nothing of five or more, under those circumstances? Why?
I’ve found myself looking into co-housing recently, too. There are some co-housing communities in the U.S., but most seem to be on the west coast. It used to be the norm to have multiple generations living together. I think it’s a fabulous idea to do something like that.
Keep looking. The NY Times has described a number, over the years, located in the East and in the Atlantic states.
One of the cool things about living in a neighborhood where Latinos are moving in is the opportunity to observe the dynamics of large families in a culture where family is central to most people’s lives. In my area, siblings will often buy near each other — often just a few houses apart, if they can swing it, but not more than a few streets distant. They also will buy near the parents, or in some cases actually buy a home for the parents that’s near where one or two siblings live.
The pretty house across the street, for example, is owned by my neighbor Maria, who also has a house not far away. For a long time her parents, Inez and Carlos, occupied the home across the street as a couple. When Carlos became so ill that he needed full-time care, the siblings hired someone to come in during the daytime, and Maria moved into the house. Carlos has since passed, and Maria still lives there with Inez, who is very far on in years now. Brothers and sisters come and go all the time. I sincerely hope that when Inez dies, Maria will stay there, because she’s a great neighbor.
It’s not exactly “co-housing,” because the dwellings don’t occupy a single building or a single piece of acreage. It has some of the advantages of co-housing, but it also evades some of the disadvantages.
Many of the lesbian women who have bought houses in Yarnell have a similar vibe going. They look out after each other.
Why would it not be possible for groups of friends or family members to colonize neighborhoods in this way? Could it even be encouraged, for example with tax breaks? Getting children to live close by (but not with) aging parents could spare the larger society a lot of expense in elder care, and provide a better quality of life for those passing through old age.
When I started taking medication for high blood pressure about 10 years ago, my doctor had to try three different classes before we found the right one and I’ve been on ever since at the same dose. Keep trying; it’s better than risking your health.
Well, when the guy looks right at a nasty, red, itchy rash on your face and says it’s not there, that doesn’t incline one to go back and nag. I’ve dealt with too many doctors over the years who “little-woman” female patients. For some reason, they behave as though they have a vested interest in keeping you on whatever pills they want you to swallow. One gynecologist actually said to me, when I was having serious side effects from Ovulen-21 (which was almost 100% estrogen!), “You’ve been reading too many women’s magazines.” At the time, I was trying to finish a Ph.D. and was reading primary and secondary materials in late 16th- and early 17th-century British history — I hadn’t seen a “women’s magazine” in years.
It also is disturbing when you do a little research of your own — not in women’s magazines but at websites attached to trustworthy names like Johns Hopkins and the Mayo — and you discover that the first line of attack on mild hypertension is diet and exercise, not drugs. I’ve lost 15 pounds and, if I could move around without pain, would soon lose the remaining five to seven pounds that need to go. The blood pressure, measured at a specific time of day, is way down.
However, it is unclear to me why a ten-point range in these measurements exists, and because of the erratic readings my home BP monitor gives, I have exactly zero faith in any of this stuff.
There’s a neat book called “In-Laws, Outlaws, and Granny Flats”–something like that. Perhaps you and your son or you and a friend could be on the lookout for property for two.
I know people who do that–for aged Ps or for grown LD children, etc. It’s part of my fantasy retirement.
He thinks it’s a sign of moral turpitude for a grown male to be associated in any way with his muther. Just to be in the same city is about as much as the poor man can tolerate.
While I like the idea of co-op type arrangements like that, there’s definitely an element of risk depending how it’s set up. If someone sells (or dies), the question of who will take over that part of the partnership can become very awkward. It’s the same general problem that we’re watching happen in the family of a good friend (who’s 89). He started many businesses in the 50’s-70’s with a handful of partners, but as the men have aged, they’ve passed ownership down to the next generation and the partnerships are beginning to become unwieldly. At some point soon (I hope for our friend’s sake it’s after he passes), some of the kids will want to cash out, and if the others don’t have enough capital to buy them out… who knows what will happen. It probably won’t be a family enterprise, that’s for sure.
ah hah! here’s where that “reply” wuz supposed to go…
A family-owned business can make an HOA look like the soul diplomacy, peace, and human kindness.
Really, in some cases (maybe most) it makes good sense for the founder to simply sell the business when she or he reaches the point where she’s tired of workin’, collect a chunk of money, and put it in a trust. Let the young folks build their own enterprises.
I know so many men, in particular, who have stepped into their fathers’ businesses because a) the business was making a good living for them and b) Dad wanted to keep the business in the family, and then worked there for decades with a general feeling of restlessness and unhappiness. As soon as the old man croaks over or checks into the nursing home, they unload the business and go get a job somewhere else.
That’s only the guys who didn’t run the businesses into the ground…I know one of those, too!
I’m not convinced that co-ops and co-housing have any more risks than any other type of living arrangement. My neighborhood could take a nose dive, and then I’m faced with the prospect of having to sell (probably for less than I’d like to get) and moving. Or, if I was renting an apartment there could be a change in management or tenants that make it less desirable, at which point I’d have to find a new place to live and pay to move. I cultivate good relationships with my neighbors now, but stuff happens in life that may make it necessary for them to sell or move, and the same for me.
Ha hah! I typed a comment into the wrong comments bar!
What’s in this glass of tapwater, anyway.
Yeah, that’s so about housing in general…there’s always the risk of a stinky neighbor or the city doing some damnfool thing to wreck the neighborhood or just the normal wear-and-tear deterioration that causes districts to run down.
But if you’re in a regular neighborhood with no HOA, you really have no understanding (other than just general good manners, something that’s no longer expected) that what you do with the property will be in the interest of the neighbors’ well-being. In an HOA, you do have some rules to abide by, but even there no one can demand that you sell to someone who fits the organization’s general demographic, or who can be depended upon to behave in x or y way.
In cohousing, it seems to me you’re in a much more intimate relationship. People who go in together to buy and develop a mutually beneficial living arrangement could rightfully have higher expectations of members. Actually, I believe that’s the case with co-ops right now: here in Px there are a few co-op arrangements — one of them in an elegant old high-rise building smack in the middle of the up-and-coming arts district — where you have to get the residents’ board to agree to your purchasing a place, and I think you have to pay for it in cash: no loans. That would make buying and selling much more restrictive than anywhere else.
On TV there are these compounds that look miserable, but I’ve seen it work before where it’s not miserable at all. I love my privacy and wouldn’t be able to do it, but to each his own!
Yes, I like my privacy, too. But at some point in your life you realize you can’t continue to live alone anymore. Even now — and I’m not yet 70 — the prospect of hip surgery leaves me utterly flummoxed. How on earth am I going to take care of myself, and what am I going to do with the dog while I’m convalescing?
Do I move into a life-care community? To do so, I have to give up good food, independence, and the ability to make my own decisions about my physical and health care…and I’m not ready to do that. Physically I may be getting there, but psychologically? I doubt if I’ll ever get there psychologically.
If there were another option — say, one where a group of friends might have their own casitas, share the cost or labor of upkeep, and agree to watch out for each other — that might (or might not) be preferable to the choices we have now.