Find Out More

Tours

A tour is your first step if you want to be on our List of Interested People.

• Quarterly Tours - Beginning mid-2025 we'll be doing tours once per quarter, alternating in-person and Zoom. In-person tours will be offered twice a year, once in the fall and once in the spring as part of National Cohousing Open House Weekend (see Events).
  
  Tour dates are posted on the East Bay Cohousing events page . Please register for the tour by RSVP-ing on that site (no drop-ins please).
"Making the Most of Your Cohousing Visits" (PDF)
Suggestions for what to pay attention to during the tour, and how to be a good guest
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"A Tour is Worth a Thousand (or More) Words" (PDF)
Describes the Cohousing Assn bus tour (sadly, the bus tour is no longer an option but the article is still worth reading)
• Annual Open House - Each spring we take part in National Cohousing Open House Weekend (see Events) where we invite folks to visit in person for a tour of our site and a unit or two, socializing with community members, and time for questions. We'll announce this via email to our Interested Persons list and on our Facebook page.

Other in-person tours are only offered when we have a unit for sale or rent.

For any in-person tours, we recommend you wear shoes that are easy to take on and off. Some areas of our community are "shoeless" and the tour goes more smoothly if we don't have to spend too much time dealing with shoes on and off.

Map, Directions & Parking

Our address is 2200 Lisa Lane, Pleasant Hill, CA 94523. But be careful if you are relying on your GPS - some of them put us in the wrong place because the numbers on our street are not consecutive. Use these maps instead.

• Google Maps - zoom in on Satellite View and you can see our blue roofs and swimming pool
• This map also shows where to park - click on the map to enlarge it:
  
  

Directions From Berkeley:

1. Take 24 East towards Walnut Creek. When it meets 680, take 680 North. Take the Monument Blvd. exit and at the end of the exit ramp turn right onto Monument.
2. Go straight through the light at Buskirk and then immediately turn right on Marcia (just before the 76 station/Food Shop and make a QUICK left onto Lisa Lane.
3. Go to the end of the street (it dead-ends at Fair Oaks Elementary School) and we're on the left (easy to spot - we're the orange-ish (we call it mango) colored buildings with blue roofs.
   
   NOTE: There is an apartment complex (Garden Park Apartments) also on our street, also on the left. We are beyond that, at the end of the street, just before the school.

Parking:

• Park in the gravel area outside the fence that runs alongside our driveway (you can see it in the photo below). Don't worry about the no parking sign -- it's ok to park there during the day. Walk up the driveway to the Common House front door, or around the building to the patio area in back.

Front of Common House

Contact Us

Cohousing Links

• Cohousing/US: The Cohousing Association
  • What is Cohousing?
  • Cohousing Communities in the U.S.
  • Events, Tours and Conferences
  • Cohousing-L email list
    View the extensive archives to get a feel for what it's like to live in cohousing, what kinds of issues come up. You can also sign up to be on the listserv.

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• East Bay Cohousing and East Bay Cohousing Meetup Group
  Betsy Morris and Raines Cohen organize many community events around the Bay Area where you can meet others interested in cohousing. They've also been enormously helpful in publicizing our tours, events, and openings.

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• CoHousing Solutions (Katie McCamant)
• The Cohousing Company (Chuck Durrett)
• Wonderland Hill Development Company
• Canadian Cohousing Network
• Foundation for Intentional Community (FIC) Directory


on Amazon.com




on Amazon.com
• Selected Books on Cohousing (links on amazon.com for convenience)
  
  
  • Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves by Katie McCamant and Chuck Durrett. The book that brought the cohousing concept to the U.S.
  • Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities by Katie McCamant and Chuck Durrett. Practical information for actually creating a community.
  • Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community by Diane Leafe Christian. "Finding Community presents a thorough overview of ecovillages and intentional communities and offers solid advice on how to research thoroughly, visit thoughtfully, evaluate intelligently, and join gracefully. Useful considerations include: Important questions to ask (of members and of yourself), Signs of a healthy (and not-so-healthy) community, Cost of joining (and staying), Common blunders to avoid"
  • The Senior Cohousing Handbook by Chuck Durrett. A community approach to independent living.
• Cohousing and Diversity

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