Woods:
So I have to ask you, um, what brought you to, you're obviously enthusiastic in talking about this. I know it's your job. I know it's your company, but, but what brought you to being so involved and supportive beyond that of co-housing?
Grace Kim: (02:39)
So I, um, learned about co-housing in the early nineties when I was in architecture school. And I thought at the time, um, we were, we were studying in London and, and my husband, who at the time I was dating, we thought it was just another type of housing that you know, of the various housing types. We were learning about that this was one, and it was only about 15 years later that we realized that was when it was first being introduced outside of Denmark, where cohousing started. And so we, it was sort of an, an innovative, alternative housing style that was being shared with us at the time, but it captured our imagination because we saw that there was so much wrong about everyone living in their nuclear households, in their single family houses, in, you know, the suburbs and, and re really relying on the automobile to get us around.
Grace Kim: (03:24)
And all of those things were isolating people. And we just liked the idea that you would know your neighbors, you would invest in your community and you would invest in your, your neighborhood and really put down roots and look out for one another. And that's very much sort of the way that I was raised. My I'm Korean, um, American and my culture is very much about community and about, um, intergenerational and about, you know, living, to supporting people in the community mm-hmm . Um, and so that was just something that we aspired to. And as we moved back to Seattle in early 2000, my husband and I kind of made a commitment that we would try to figure out how do we move towards living in a, in a more intentional community focused way. Uh, we thought it would be with his family actually as living in a family compound, that was sort of an early, early idea. Um, and then it just morphed into that helping us solidify, you know, the urban location we wanted to live in and, um, a very interconnected and, and intergenerational way to live in a very urban environment. But cohousing, doesn't always, it's usually not in an urban environment like Sunnyside village, uh, which schema workshop my company is, the architect of, um, Sunnyside is very much in a suburban slash rural setting. And so that is the more typical, uh, setting for co-housing in the us.
Woods:
Ah, okay. So of that combination kind of thing, can you describe that a little bit more? I'm from Chicago so I’m trying to understand. In the construct of rural and urban, where does that actually put cohousing?
Kim:
So, I mean, it's, it, it's usually in suburban settings in that it's, you know, oftentimes in the US cohousing is single family homes or attached duplexes, triplexes, quadplexes or something like that. And, and I say in Sunnyside’s case it's suburban slash rural because it used to be farmland. And as development has happened over time in the city as Marysville there're, you know, they're just at the end of a street that is basically a couple of subdivisions. So the area is transforming into a more suburban style of residential, single family homes, residential pattern, but it, it has very much a, a rural character on when you're on the property. And also it's a wetland, um, a stream, a Creek and, and wetland buffer. So it, it will retain a lot of that character.
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