Send us a message!

In Episode 29 Lynn Morstead and Kelli Soika take a walk through their new neighborhood and discover wonderful destinations all within 15 minutes of home!

The 15- minute neighborhood concept has caught our eye recently. We wondered what would be accessible on foot from our cohousing community, so we made a date and set out on foot one morning to see what we could learn. If you want to follow along, get your Google map ready and start at 114 Delmar, Houston, Texas 77011. We’re going to head north and east first. On this first walkabout we will stop and talk at the following spots:

• Burnet Elementary School - 5403 Canal St.
• Finca Tres Robles  - corner of Norwood and Canal St.
• Magnolia’s Ice Cream & More - 6421 Brady .
• Street to Kitchen - 6501 Harrisburg Blvd - one block to the west of Old Town Harrisburg
• The Harrisburg Bike and Hike Trail

Listen in to learn more.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 28 Lynn Morstead and Kelli Soika take a look at cohousing through two different lenses.
Lynn reflects on the many ways in which our lives have been made easier by devices like auto correct, eBikes, cars that parallel park, etc. and how cohousing is yet another way of making our run more smoothly in our modern world.  
Kelli talks about how the rough edges of modern life can be blunted by cohousing because our rough edges are isolation.  Some of the perceived inconveniences of cohousing actually serve to reconnect us with the people in our lives to counteract that isolation. 

Listen in to learn more.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 27 Lynn Morstead and Kelli Soika explore what it takes to learn how to adopt new ways of participating in community that are different from what most of us have learned up to this point. They look at this learning curve through the lens of  "The Four Stages of Competence". They rename the stages:

1. Unconscious incompetence  to "dolt"
2. Conscious incompetence to "seeker" or "flummoxed"
3. Conscious competence to "student"
4. Unconscious competence to "teacher"

Listen in to learn more about their journey back and forth through these stages in community.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 26 Lynn Morstead & Kelli Soika interview Bob Francis about his family's move into Haystack Heights, in Spokane, Washington.  His family was part of the first wave to move into their community after several years of planning. He shares some of the mechanics of the move-in process, personal experiences with the start-up and what they are focusing on today, 18 months later.

Listen in to learn more.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 25 Lynn Morstead and Kelli Soika interview a member, Valentina Hoyos, about her journey to cohousing, how this concept was something they had been talking about before they found out that it was being built in Houston. It feels very familiar to the environment she grew up in, in her home country of Colombia. She shares her experience of how our  forming cohousing community has supported her and her family even before we all move in together. 

Listen in to learn more.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 24 Kelli Soika interviews Shelley Parks about her long-planned, eagerly-awaited, and recently-completed (!) move into Skagit Commons, a new cohousing community in Anacortes, Washington.  Shelly shares how she and her husband came to the decision to move into a smaller home and what it has been like to move in with neighbors in cohousing.

Listen in to learn more.

Shelly is the founder of CoVision Consulting,  and has visited us before to share her story of jumping into cohousing first as a professional career shift, and then as a personal lifestyle choice.  To hear the beginning of her story, check out Episode 7 of Tell Me More.

Bonus: Learn to say "Skagit." 

Send us a message!

In Episode 23 Lynn Morstead interviews a more recent member, Phil Berrie, about his journey to cohousing. He talks about his background, how he learned about cohousing, what has prepared him for consensus decisions making and how the Explorer experience was key to helping him make the decision to join. He's one of our members that was an Explorer on two separate occasions before applying for membership. 

Listen in to learn more.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 22 Lynn Morstead and Kelli Soika talk about making new friends in adulthood. Inspired by Marisa Fanco's TED Talk about her book, Platonic, here are some of the key take-aways from her talk that they dig into deeper:

• "Collective connections are needed to make you feel whole"
• “For friendships to happen organically you need to have repeated unplanned interactions and shared vulnerability”
• “Transitioners” - are more likely to engage in new connections
• “The Exposure effect" - we tend to like people just because they are familiar. 

Listen in to learn more.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 21 Lynn Morstead and Kelli Soika kick the tires on the new Open AI large language model, ChatGPT, by asking it some questions about living in community and then critiquing the answers.
The questions they ask are:

• How do you screen people for an intentional community? 
• What should you do if someone joins your intentional community, and you don’t get along with them?
•  Does consensus decision-making really work?
• Are the optimal conditions for successful consensus decision-making?
• How is an intentional community different from other communities?

Listen in to learn more about how  ChatGPT performed and why we still need real humans to tell the real stories about living in community.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected]. 

Send us a message!

In Episode 20 Lynn Morstead and Kelli Soika interview Bryn Kanar from Sata Cruz, California, who has embarked on a search for a cohousing community to move to when he retires. Bryn attended one of Houston's recent information sessions on his journey through the various communities that meet his family's initial criteria.

They discussed:

• If you’ve visited with one group, have you “seen one, seen them all”? 
• What role does geography play for you?
• What is it like to envision living somewhere different AND in a different way?
• Do you have any tips for others who are shopping? 
• Do you have  any tips for a group like ours that is recruiting? 

Listen in to learn more.

For more information about our project, please check out our website at www.cohousinghouston.com. Let us know if you have any comments or ideas by emailing us at [email protected].