Mission Peak Village creates new Bay Area housing and intergenerational connections
Homebuyers in
2023 are questioning whether conventional neighborhoods work well for them. Many are now more acutely sensitive to isolation from neighbors — the possibility of living among people you rarely see or interact with.
It’s hard to know if a prospective community will be friendly.
Members of Mission Peak Village believe finding a home should be more than a real estate transaction; it is a lifestyle choice. Residents are their own developers with an active role in building homes on a site that meets their own rigorous criteria. Mission Peak Village hired an experienced development consultant,
bought land and selected an architect. By move-in time, they will already be a connected community of intergenerational neighbors.
Mission Peak Village didn’t invent this approach. The group adopted an intentional community model called cohousing, introduced to North America in 1988 by architects Kathryn
McCamant and Chuck Durrett with their seminal book “Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves,” based upon an innovative model popularized in Denmark.
The authors observed that cohousers in Denmark were happier and better connected to their neighbors than most Americans in tracts of compartmentalized single-family units. In cohousing, each household maintains a personal residence, but the neighbors also share amenities to reduce the daily cost of living and create opportunities for human interaction.
Today, North America can claim more than 180 cohousing communities. Inspired by their predecessors, Mission Peak Village is establishing Fremont’s first cohousing development of 32 condominiums clustered around a sizable common house (community center). Designed for daily use, the common house will feature a large kitchen and dining area suitable