The Front Yards We Lost
When I think back to the neighborhood where I grew up in Denver, I don’t remember the houses very clearly. I couldn’t tell you how many square feet they were or what style of architecture they were. I don’t remember who had remodeled a kitchen, finished their basement, or added a sunroom onto the original patio slab. What I remember are the places between the homes.
I remember riding my bike until the streetlights came on. I remember neighborhood-wide games of tag that somehow spilled across half a dozen front yards without anyone ever asking permission. I remember drawing hopscotch courts with sidewalk chalk and skating up and down the sidewalks until someone inevitably fell and everyone stopped to make sure they were okay. On warm summer evenings, it seemed like every front porch or front stoop had someone sitting outside while children played. Conversations happened naturally because people were already there. If you walked down the block, you rarely made it home without stopping to say hello to someone.
Those memories have stayed with me for a long time, but they’re actually layered with even older memories from my grandparents’ home in a small town in western Oklahoma. Their house didn’t have air conditioning, just open windows and a few fans that worked overtime during the summer. After supper, everyone moved outside. My grandparents’ best friends came over almost every evening, while other neighbors wandered by whenever they had time. Someone was usually snapping green beans, shelling peas, or shucking corn while the conversation drifted from family news to local gossip to stories that had probably been told a hundred times before.
My sister and I played in the yard or the driveway, sometimes with other children and sometimes on our own, always within earshot of the adults. Looking back, I don’t remember many of the conversations, but I remember the feeling of belonging to something larger than our own family. At the time, I assumed every neighborhood worked that way. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how unusual those memories had become.
Somewhere along the way, many of our neighborhoods changed. Homes became larger. Garages moved to the front. Backyards became more private. Air conditioning meant windows stayed closed through the summer. None of those changes were wrong. They reflected changing lifestyles, growing communities, and new priorities. But together they quietly changed where life happened. Instead of gathering in front yards, we gathered in backyards. Instead of sidewalks filled with children and neighbors, we drove into our garages, closed the door, and went inside. We still had wonderful homes, but we had fewer opportunities to simply bump into one another.
Years later, after I started learning about cohousing, I came across a phrase that immediately took me back to those childhood memories. Architect Chuck Durrett talks about “life between the buildings.” It’s such a simple phrase, but it captures something profound. He points out that traditional suburban neighborhoods are largely designed around streets, driveways, garages, and private backyards. In cohousing communities, homes are intentionally arranged around pedestrian walkways and shared green spaces instead. As a result, people naturally spend much more of their time in places where they see one another.
The design itself doesn’t create community—people do. What thoughtful design can do is make community easier by creating more opportunities for neighbors to naturally cross paths throughout the day. A walk to check the mail becomes a conversation. Watering flowers turns into helping a neighbor harvest tomatoes. Children playing outside become the reason parents get to know one another. Those interactions aren’t planned, and they aren’t required. They simply become part of everyday life.
That distinction has become one of the guiding ideas behind Gratitude Village. As we’ve worked with Studio Co+Hab over the past year, we’ve spent surprisingly little time talking about roads compared to the time we’ve spent talking about pathways, gathering places, gardens, and the beautiful cottonwood grove on our Brighton property. We’ve talked about where children might naturally play, where neighbors might linger after checking their mail, and how the Common House becomes part of everyday life instead of a place reserved for meetings and special events. Those conversations aren’t really about buildings. They’re about people.
When I first started visiting cohousing communities more than a decade ago, I thought I was searching for a different kind of housing. Looking back now, I don’t think that was ever really true. I wasn’t looking for smaller homes or a Common House or even a particular architectural style. I was looking for a feeling that had been quietly planted years earlier in my grandparents’ yard in Oklahoma and reinforced in the Denver neighborhood where I grew up. I was looking for the feeling of knowing your neighbors, of children playing freely outside, and of conversations that happened simply because someone was sitting on a front porch as you walked by.
I don’t expect Gratitude Village to recreate my childhood neighborhood or those summer evenings in western Oklahoma. Every community develops its own traditions, its own stories, and its own personality. But I do hope we’re creating a place where children can ride their bikes until dusk, neighbors stop to talk without checking the time, and someone always seems to be outside enjoying the evening. Years from now, I hope people won’t remember the square footage of their homes nearly as much as they’ll remember the friendships they built, the conversations they shared, and the life that happened between the buildings.