Brooklyn Cohousing — an organization hoping to establish a cooperative community of private residences with communal space — is disbanding after three years, according to the Brooklyn Eagle. Beginning in September 2007, the group started making plans to locate its community on three different sites in Brooklyn, hiring architects and assembling a construction team, in an effort to become the first cohousing project in New York City. In May 2009, Cohousing came closest to realizing its vision with a former factory and warehouse site at 1901 Eighth Avenue in Greenwood Heights, a three-story building which was to be retrofitted as a 30-unit apartment building containing studios and one-, two- and three-bedroom units, plus communal areas. At the time, the group had 16 committed households, according to spokesperson and founding member Alex Marshall. But financial difficulties prevented the project from moving forward. “Attempting to build a physical development during the worst financial crisis of the last half century simply proved too much for us,” organizers wrote to members in an email. “Cohousing will surely come to Brooklyn someday, but it won’t be through Brooklyn Cohousing.” [Brooklyn Eagle]

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New York architects are warming up to passive houses — a
voluntary super energy efficient home building standard that has a
following in Europe but is still in its infancy in the U.S. Brooklyn
Cohousing in Park Slope would be one of the first residential projects
in New York and one of only a handful in the country to be built as a
passive house. Future residents of the Park Slope development have
endorsed the passive standard proposed by Ken Levenson, whose firm,
Levenson McDavid Architects, is designing the building at 1901 Eighth
Avenue at 19th Street. Levenson stumbled upon the building standard
while hunting online for ideas on reducing a building’s carbon
footprint. After reading about passive homes and consulting with
German-born architect Katrin Klingenberg, who designed the first
American passive house in Urbana, Ill., Levenson became convinced the
standard could work for Brooklyn Cohousing. [more]