Zev was busy professionally educating people across the country about cohousing, still in its infancy with just nineteen communities completed in the United States. (There are currently 120 in North America.) Step one in Zev’s approach was to correct the perception that a cohousing community is the same as a 1970s hippie commune. “It’s the only well-known group-living model that people have heard a lot about,” he explains. “So, much of the time is explaining what cohousing is, describing it as an intentional neighborhood with private home ownership with an HOA that owns a common clubhouse. I start there because that is verbiage that people understand. And then you can start to layer in that the group is self-managed, that we make decisions a form of consensus, that we do activities together like occasional shared meals and community workdays, and then it starts to fill in for people what cohousing really is.” Very quickly, Zev’s work changed the course of Neshama’s career.
