Details

Katie leads CoHousing Solutions. She brings the depth and diversity of her experience as an architect, developer, and cohousing resident to her clients. She lived in Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, for 12 years, and now lives in Nevada City Cohousing in the Sierra Foothills. Both communities she founded.​

“What drives me is the desire to develop neighborhood models where we can live a better ‘good life’ while reducing our impact on the earth’s limited resources. Americans currently uses 24% of the worlds’ energy while we make up only 5% of world population. If we are to ‘save the world,’ we must strive for more sustainable market-driven models that are attractive to the American middle class.”

Katie is a licensed architect and coauthor of the authoritative book on cohousing, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, which introduced this housing model to North America. Katie co-founded McCamant & Durrett Architects / The CoHousing Company with Charles Durrett, in 1987, and partnered with developer, Jim Leach, on numerous projects. Since then, Katie has designed and developed dozens of cohousing communities in the United States and Canada. In addition to pioneering cohousing in North America, Katie has designed a variety of other building types, including numerous affordable housing communities and a sustainably designed (LEED certified) Unitarian Church. For the past decade, Katie has focused on the development side of cohousing projects. She has worked on all aspects of developing cohousing from project kick-off to move-in. Her expertise includes setting up project budgets, structure financing, and facilitating planning approvals, finding construction financing, contractor selection, construction management, marketing efforts, and community policy creation. She also works with groups to find appropriate development partners, and then assists in structuring those partnerships.

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In 2011, Katie coauthored Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities that documents the lessons learned after of two decades of creating cohousing communities in North America. She has also authored articles and chapters for other books. A recent contribution includes a chapter for the book Not Your Mother’s Retirement. Katie often lectures and gives workshops on various aspects of sustainable development. She was a founding board member of The Cohousing Association of the United States and co-chaired several of their national conferences. She has been recognized as a Dwell Leader by Dwell magazine, and in 2008 was named Developer of the Year by The Cohousing Association. Her projects have won numerous awards. She is regularly requested as a speaker at Conferences, Presentations and on the radio. Learn more and contact us to learn about requesting Katie for these opportunities here.

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Her newest venture is the 500 Communities Program, a yearlong training for passionate entrepreneurs who seek to devote themselves to building the next 500 cohousing communities while working collaboratively, supporting each other and making a good living. Those interested in learning more about the Program are encouraged to sign up for the mailing list to receive updates.

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Katie graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at UC Berkeley and completed her graduate work at the Royal Academy of Art and Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark. After living in Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, California, for 12 years, she now lives at Nevada City Cohousing.