What is Cohousing?
Cohousing is an intentional community of private homes clustered around shared space, where neighbors interact and share resources like tools, bicycles, and laundry. Each home has its own complete private kitchen, while a shared common house offers a full kitchen, dining area, and other amenities. Common life is anchored by a weekly shared meal, monthly workdays, and occasional all-community meetings. Our proximity creates natural opportunities to support one another -- through conversations, prayer, or simply showing up.
Who Lives Here?
We believe the healthiest way to live is in community. Our residents include teachers, architects, writers, pastors, nurses, small business owners, finance experts, and artists. We are proud of our religious, ideological, professional, and age diversity -- some attend church on Sundays, others belong to Buddhist sanghas. The community includes singles, families, owners, and renters. We see our differences as generative, not divisive.
Our History
Founded in 2000 by members of a United Methodist church seeking to live their faith more actively, Temescal Commons has evolved into an interfaith community built on three enduring principles: radical hospitality (everyone deserves kindness), community, and sustainability. We occupy just under half an acre in urban Oakland -- three lots combined – and our property includes solar panels, a productive vegetable garden, persimmon and apple trees, and a prolific blackberry bush well-loved by passersby.
What We Share
A central courtyard serves as the hub of community life, with spontaneous chats over coffee, children playing, and dogs wandering among the flowers. Beyond our individual units, we share a laundry room, tool shed, bike shed, exercise room, meditation garden, vegetable garden, a dining room, and an industrial-sized kitchen. A flexible barn space upstairs has been used by writers finishing feature pieces, designers printing 3D prototypes, dance classes, and much more.
The glue holding our community together is a shared Sunday meal that alternates between potlucks and hosted dinners. Each quarter, households sign up to plan, shop, cook, and clean for one meal, making it an easy, breezy experience for everyone else. Members can also request a saved plate or grab food on their way out for the evening.
We hold monthly Saturday workdays. After morning coffee and a discussion about what needs doing on the property, we head out together to weed, turn compost, or fix fences until noon. Many of our greatest conversations happen in the garden. Every gathering, including board meetings, opens and closes with a prayer, poem, or contemplative reading from a variety of traditions — for example, a biblical passage or a Wendell Berry or Maya Angelou poem.
Privacy & Social Balance
Community life here comes with genuine flexibility. Members range widely in how social they are, and that's warmly celebrated. It's perfectly fine to attend the Sunday meal, make a plate, and head home to be alone. We are compassionately attentive to one another's wellbeing, but always respectful of privacy and introversion.
Membership & Ownership
Temescal Commons is structured as a condominium association. Each household holds an individual mortgage and pays dues to the association, which cover insurance and both short- and long-term property maintenance. As required by California law, a board that consists of one representative per household governs the association, and meets monthly.
What are the biggest gifts of living in the community?
Every one of us has a different answer for this. Here are just a few, from our community members:
“It’s impossible to sum it up, but I would say that becoming a parent within this community has been my biggest gift. I have so many mentors that I can ask questions of or just get much-needed, long-term perspective, and I know my kids will grow up with a variety of role models, aunties, and uncles. I have neither the skill nor time to nurture the garden, and yet my family and I benefit from it every single day. I never feel existentially alone.”
“Living in this community has given me many opportunities to grow in both being more compassionate towards others and setting appropriate limits. Cohousing is like a crash course on adult development -- and that truly is a gift.”
“Community made the leap of first-time homeownership a much less daunting, anxiety-ridden experience for me. I benefit so much- from a neighbor’s relative who acted as broker, to the advice of those in community with a great eye for design or a skilled hand for woodworking and faucet-fixing. It feels a bit like training wheels for homeownership.”
Other questions?
Visit our Contact page and someone from the community will respond as soon as we're able.
Quote we love
We need to untwist our notion of personal freedom by acknowledging that dependence is the human condition. Genuine freedom can’t be had by denying our individual limitations. Freedom comes from understanding them and working around them, and from building a community where bonds of loyalty compensate for the things we can’t do ourselves.
Deborah Stone