Cluster Housing Environmentally Friendly, Socially Supportive

For the past fifty years, towns and cities in the state of New Hampshire have worked to impose zoning restrictions on lands within their borders, in large part to protect against overdevelopment. Some towns require building lots of anywhere from a half-acre to five acres for a detached single-family home. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of this regulation has been that real estate developers have subdivided large parcels of land into smaller plots and leveled forested areas, filled in swamps, and generally degraded the ecosystem of the property in favor of rows of houses, all with their own little front and back yards.

Cluster housing, which is beginning to be considered in New Hampshire, uses a different approach. If a town requires that a particular piece of land have a two-acre minimum for building sites, a traditional developer would subdivide the land into ten units and build a home on each unit. A cluster development, however, involves concentrating those same ten houses in a single area on perhaps four acres of the land, leaving 16 acres relatively undeveloped, thus preserving natural wildlife habitats and forested areas that can be enjoyed by the residents.

The Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, a new housing development project in Peterborough, New Hampshire, takes the cluster housing concept one step further. Twenty-nine small single-family homes will be augmented by shared areas on the 113-acre site, which will also include a small working organic farm. The shared facilities offer places where the community's residents can interact. This co-housing concept, which originated in Denmark, offers community support while utilizing the land in an environmentally sustainable way.

The Peterborough project is a great idea, one that will hopefully spread throughout the state. The down side is that the housing units are expensive; according to a June 19, 2006, article in the Keene Sentinel, prices start at $278,000 for an 849-square-foot home and extend to $580,000 for a 1334-square-foot home - very reasonable considering the amenities, but far beyond the reach of many working-class families.

Perhaps as the Nubanusit project succeeds other communities will learn from it and take the cluster and cooperative housing concepts into account when developing new residential projects. Combining low- and middle-income housing, both for families and single people, with elder and assisted living facilities makes sense, for instance, providing a community atmosphere for those who often find themselves isolated because of financial, age-, or health-related circumstances. Ownership of single-family homes could be augmented with small rental units or even a cluster of low-cost single-occupancy rooms with common cooking and living facilities, with the rent going to pay the expenses of the rental units themselves and possibly helping pay general expenses for the community.

Cluster and cooperative housing can potentially offer solutions to a lot of problems. Thoughtful cluster housing development may actually allow New Hampshire to sustain its recent growth while meeting the needs of all its citizens and preserving the natural environment that draws people to the state in the first place.