Editor,

I’ve always been interested in mushrooms so it shouldn’t be surprising that I think of co-housing communities as urban mycelium. The parallels are extraordinary and enlightening. Ideally, you would expect residents of co-housing communities to be symbionts rather than decomposers, but these communities are rarely homogeneous and rarely well screened.

On a walk through our Pacific Northwest forests in the fall, you can easily find all sorts of fruiting bodies peaking up through a thick veil of leaf litter: club mushrooms and boletes, polypores and puffballs, etc. In a co-housing community, expect to find grouches and moochers, the lazy, the two-faced, and worst of all, the self-infatuated “source of joy and love for all to admire.” Beware. Most of these varieties are toxic, even in small quantities.

If you intend to cultivate mushrooms, you must carefully inoculate a well-chosen and prepared substrate. If you intend to start an intentional community, you must select your members very carefully. If getting units sold and paying off lenders is a priority, expect that invasives will likely dominate and foul the intended harvest. If you inoculate with shiitake spores and death caps sprout up, then you’ve not paid enough attention to a fundamental principal that Gandhi espoused: If you want to grow a rose, don’t plant a cactus. In the case of co-housing: if you want a successful community, don’t sell to the self-absorbed, the power hungry, the mindless, the arrogant, or anyone wearing a tin hat.

I know. It’s obvious to me now that I shouldn’t have bought a unit without first going to a full meeting of all current residents, and I shouldn’t have eaten that amanita muscaria. Still, the dues are affordable and there are some wonderfully talented residents, and the amanita was quite tasty. The hallucinogenic properties were also quite amazing.

Verrall Hoover

Langley