One Family’s Journey Into Building an Intentional Community

 

Nancie Hamlett moved to Minnesota in 1987 with a three-year-old and an infant. Eventually, they moved into a fourplex with her sister’s family and her parents. As her children grew, she bought a house and moved out — but the longing for an intentional community returned. Having grown up in an environment that made room for people who needed housing and family, experienced dorm life, and moved through the loneliness of single parenting, she knew that the traditional nuclear family was not the only way to structure home life.

“I had a friend who moved to Indiana to live with friends on several acres of land in the country,” Hamlett says. “They were joined by others over the years. We vacationed there every summer. I had a taste of what an intentional community could be.”

In March 2020, she moved to Becketwood Cooperative, a senior independent living community in Minneapolis. “I loved the vitality of the community and the ease of developing friendships,” she says. “But I missed living close to my grandkids. So when my daughter’s family started forming an intentional community, I decided to join them.”

Her daughter, Beka Herzog, had fond memories of growing up in the fourplex with cousins and grandparents as well as annual visits to the Indiana community. In 2021, she and her husband were living in a single-family home with their three children. “As parents, we felt isolated and overwhelmed. It felt like we didn’t have enough time or energy to do everything we needed to do, let alone have time to maintain friendships,” Herzog says.

In addition, “Our children longed for other children to play with. We decided the best way to meet our needs and our children’s needs was to live in community with other families with children.”

The Herzogs started looking for a local intentional community to join, but couldn’t find any that had space for a family of five. So they decided to start one. They had conversations with other interested families, read books, did trainings, listened to podcasts, and visited communities to learn more. With the support of others, they started Twin Cities Family Cooperative, an intentional community that quickly moved from being focused on families with children to also being intergenerational.

The Herzogs and three other families read the book Creating a Life Together by Diana Leafe Christian. They met regularly to discuss what they read and how to apply it to develop an intentional community. They wrote a community vision. In May 2025, after years of preparation, the Herzogs moved into their community property. They indicate it is not perfect property, but it gives them the opportunity to start living together, now with six adults and four children.

Twin Cities Family Cooperative (TCFC) uses consensus for decision-making, which is common in cohousing communities compared to more general cooperatives. Households in TCFC own a share in the community rather than owning a unit. As such, they can move spaces as family needs change. Monthly operating dues are based on a percentage of the household’s income regardless of the space.

They have space to add new members, and plan to double in size over the next several years. Their first property is on the bank of the Mississippi River, in a seven-unit apartment building that uses two of the apartments as community space. They are partnering with Awaken Architecture to grow the community into a new three-story building.

Says Herzog, “The best parts for me are the shared mealtimes and the children playing together.”

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Author Becca Brackett (she/her) is a volunteer with Cedar Cohousing, a group seeking a site in the Twin Cities urban area. Learn more at cohousingmn.org

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SIDEBAR: Progressive Visions in Denmark and Oregon

Co-housing became a more common option in Denmark in the 1970s, through architect Jan Gudmand-Hoyer, who saw the value of social communal areas alongside relatively small private housing units. It might not be a concept for people who prefer independence or introversion, but offers ways to share childcare, cooking, and family balance when facing long work hours. City zoning, however, can be a barrier to creating community-led housing.

In 2016, one-third of Oregon’s households — half of all renters, and a quarter of homeowners — were spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Oregon’s rental vacancy rate was the lowest in the nation. In 2019, a bipartisan Oregon legislature reduced single-family zoning in most neighborhoods to accelerate innovative housing alternatives and address housing shortages and affordability. Additional landmark legislation (House Bill 2138) was signed into law by Governor Tina Kotek in July 2025 to try to rectify lingering zoning issues.

Read about it in a report from The Century Foundation

 

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