Where We Belong (17 page)

Zev was pleased. “I thought,
Okay, well this is a really good sign
.”

So, how
would
the two get along? Zev’s middle-class upbringing was completely different from Kay’s cushy seat in the lap of luxury. He grew up in a 2,500-square-foot house that he moved into with his mother at eight years old when his parents divorced. The home in Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles, was fifteen minutes from where his father lived. He had a close relationship with his mom and spent weekends at his dad’s house babysitting his younger sister and brother while his father took a date to dinner or a movie. After high school, Zev worked his way through college as a chef and majored in marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In his junior year, Zev transferred to Oakes College at UC Santa Cruz to participate in a special program focused on marine mammals. An exciting part of the program involved studying a colony of seals that lived on a small island off the California coast.

“It was sort of my Jacques Cousteau experience,” he says with a laugh. “For an entire winter on Friday mornings I would don a wetsuit and get into a little inflatable boat and ride a quarter mile out to the island with a few other students. We kept track of the elephant seals, monitoring, weighing, and marking them.”

But it was a class on land that changed the direction of Zev’s life. A course titled “Utopian Visions of a Modern World” exposed him to the idea of using environmental and economic strategies to create sustainable communities. He studied the various ways that responsible planning could lead to long-term prosperity.

“That’s what really opened me up to the fact that we can save the dolphins and the whales,” says Zev, “but if we as humans don’t figure out better ways of doing things, it’s not really going to matter.”

In June 1980, Zev graduated with degrees in environmental planning and aquatic biology. He spent the summer in Oregon working as a planning intern at an “intentional community” that was under development. Over the next few years, he learned about alternative wastewater treatment and solar design, and also cooked in restaurants and worked on construction sites.

In 1985, Zev moved to Boulder and got married. Just five years later, his life would change in two significant ways: he went through a divorce, and he attended the first International Ecocity Conference in Berkeley, held to discuss how best to reform cities to be in balance with nature. During the 1990 conference, the founders of a movement called cohousing spoke and explained the strategies featured in their book,
Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves
.

“I came back from the conference to Boulder,” Zev says, “and immediately went to the bookstore and read the cohousing book and thought,
Oh, okay. This makes sense; this is the next step for me
.”

Within two years, he boarded a plane to Denmark, the birthplace of cohousing, or what the Danes call “living community,” made popular in the 1970s.

“Their situation was very similar to ours. They had a growing middle class, there were a lot of people with full-time jobs who ended up with latchkey kids who didn’t have anybody there when they got home,” Zev explains. “They said, ‘There’s got to be a better way to organize our neighborhoods to deal with the realities of our lives.’ ”

The concept was brought back to the United States in the early 1980s by two American architects doing their graduate studies in Denmark. Instead of using the Danish term “living community,” they labeled the neighborhood model “cohousing.” Following his trip to Denmark, Zev created a slide show and traveled the western United States educating people about cohousing.

In 1992, he rented a home in Nyland Cohousing, a large rural cohousing community outside Denver. With 135 residents living in 42 homes, the development on 140 acres was too large and relied too heavily on cars for Zev’s liking, but he wanted to get a feel for the experience. In the meantime, he and a group of future residents were searching for an ideal parcel of land where they could develop a smaller, more urban cohousing community in Boulder.

In 1993, Zev took a second trip to Denmark and, over the next two years, created a video presentation to replace the slide show. He continued consulting and training groups on how to form, design, and develop cohousing communities. At that time, only seven neighborhoods were up and running in the United States, primarily in California, Colorado, and Washington State.

In 1996, Zev was four years into renting at the large cohousing community and preparing to make a move. He and his future cohabitants had located a one-acre piece of land in an urban setting that would accommodate eleven homes. They named the community Nomad after the adjacent Nomad Theater, which sold them the land. Zev reserved a 675-square-foot one-bedroom home with an unfinished basement.

And that brings us back to the summer of 1996, when two sets of eyes met across the dance floor.

From Zev’s journal:

OCT 6, 1996

It was a good time for me to reconnect with the group and many people were there. One very new one and someone who has caught my eye the first time I saw her is Kay. I wonder what her Hebrew name is? I will have to ask. She is a beautiful pixie of a woman and very feminine and dances nice and is single, Jewish, intelligent, very beautiful, and lives right here in Boulder.

On their first date—dinner at an Indian restaurant—Zev asked Kay about her Hebrew name. She was amazed because she’d been silently using a Hebrew name during meditation. The name signified the deep breath taken when the soul enters and leaves the body.

“When he asked me, I decided to verbalize it. I said, ‘Well, the name that I like is Neshama.’ He said, ‘Can I call you that?’ ”

From that night on, Kay became Neshama. She and Zev had made a deep connection during their first three encounters and over a long dinner.

“We covered an amazing amount of territory,” Zev recalls. “It was obvious that neither of us were kidding around. We both wanted to know what the other person was about. We talked about religion and spirituality, and children. By the end of that evening it was clear that there was something very powerful here already, and that was our first date.”

Zev invited Neshama to an event that weekend he was hosting. Leaders in the cohousing movement from across the country were gathering to discuss the latest challenges and advancements. Zev had told Neshama over dinner about his passion for sustainable communities, but she had a lot to learn.

“The word ‘sustainability,’ ” she says, “was not even a part of my vocabulary at that point.”

Neshama was falling in love with a man whose vision of “community” was very different from hers.

“That second date made it clear to me:
Hmm . . . this is something Zev is really passionate about. He’s going to want to live in one.
”

By December, just four months after they met, the two were pressed to determine the depth of their love.

“When I met Neshama,” Zev explains, “we had to quickly decide whether this was real for us, and if so, we had to switch homes because the home I had reserved was not going to work for the two of us, especially if we were going to have children.”

Neshama agreed to take a leap of faith, with a caveat.

“My agreement with Zev was: I’ll try cohousing for two years, but if it’s not working, I reserve the right to move out of the community and into the house that I originally thought I would move into. That house would be much more isolated, up in the woods, where I could walk out and not see anyone. It would be very different from this style of living where I would be next to more than two dozen people on one acre of land.”

“I was open to that,” Zev says. “I didn’t know how it was going to work for me, either, being in the industry as well as being a resident. Certainly our commitment to each other was strong enough that I said I’m willing to try it out and we can touch base in two years.”

Neshama and Zev put a contract down on one of the largest homes in the development: 2,100 square feet with a finished basement. The plan was for her father to move into the small home Zev had reserved before they met. In Neshama’s mind, adding custom touches to the existing blueprints would help ease the transition into such a new and different living experience.

“When we started talking about the house,” Zev recalls, “she said, ‘That’s not going to work; I’m going to need something quite different.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have the finances to be able to do that,’ and at some point she said, ‘I do.’ ”

Zev was unaware of the extent of Neshama’s wealth. She told him that
she
would finance adjustments to the house that would make it more comfortable for her: a formal entryway; additional windows; an open, winding staircase; a walk-in closet; and several of the elegant, imported chandeliers from the Columns, which were incorporated into the decor. She also wanted a home office in case they were blessed with a family.

“I felt when my kids came home, I wanted to be there. They should know that they are seen and heard and that they are loved. It’s important that someone stops their work and is with you. With a successful CEO as a mother, I didn’t get much one-on-one attention growing up and spent a lot of lonely time after school by myself.”

Zev wanted a steam shower, a Jacuzzi-style tub, and a hot tub on the top level. Even with the upgrades, Neshama was still somewhat apprehensive.

“I remember walking through our town home when it was under construction,” she says, “and the first floor was seven hundred fifty square feet, which was about the size of my New York apartment. I thought,
I moved to Colorado to live in a house—the one at the end of the long driveway, not this town home sharing walls with neighbors on either side of me.
”

Zev tried to help her envision the end result.

“I took her up to the very top floor that has this phenomenal view of Boulder and the Flatirons. At that point she said, ‘Okay, I can do this.’ ”

Their house would be ready in a year. The pair had collaborated so well designing the house and interacting with their neighbors in Nomad that they decided to work together. Abraham and Associates was renamed Abraham Paiss & Associates.

In June 1997, Zev accepted the role of executive director of the Cohousing Association of the United States. The couple was busy personally as well. That summer, they traveled with Harry to New York City to sell his apartment and pack up his belongings to ship to Nomad. Zev brought along an engagement ring and talked to Harry when Neshama was in the other room.

“I asked him for his blessing to marry her. He was not speaking at that point, but he smiled and nodded. I could see his eyes got wet. It was definitely a yes.”

Under a full moon on the roof of Neshama’s Manhattan apartment building, Zev proposed. She accepted and they were pregnant within a month. Sadly, Harry passed away in September, just two months before they were all scheduled to move into Nomad.

Nomad Development, Boulder, 2010
(Courtesy of Zev Paiss)

In November 1997, Zev and Neshama officially became cohousers. They solely owned the interior of their condominium and shared ownership of the land and the exterior of the eleven total homes with their fellow cohabitants. Including Zev and Neshama, eighteen people moved into Nomad. They were all well acquainted after several years of working together to purchase the land, design the community, and oversee the construction process.

Each of their homes faced a common grassy courtyard that formed a hub, an inviting gathering place to promote daily interaction. A 750-square-foot common house was available for frequent social events—like birthday parties and community meetings—and group dinners twice a week. Teams were assigned to coordinate property workdays, stock the common house, collect homeowners’ association fees, and handle other duties to keep the community running smoothly. There was also a collective desire to respect the environment. Every home was well insulated and designed with sufficient south-side windows for passive solar heating. Neighbors shared one lawn mower and garden tools to tend the community’s land, which included fruit trees and a small garden. They selected the Nomad property because retail shops, restaurants, and a major bus route were just a one-minute walk away, cutting back on the need to drive.

“Cohousing residents share a common interest to live in a neighborhood,” Zev says, “where you interact with your neighbors more, have community meals together, and you take responsibility for the maintenance of the property.”

Their home in Nomad
(Courtesy of Neshama Abraham)