The kid roaming zone. Age 0-9.

Traffic safety professionals state that kids shouldn’t cross the street alone until age ten.  Why do we design our neighborhoods like this?

So we’d be facing maybe 10 years before our children could expand their zone to across the street without oversight. We're lucky if the kids have a similarly-aged friend two doors down.   The kids would need to be even older before we let them ride their bikes off alone to some distant friend’s house. In the meantime, we spend so much of our time arranging play dates and driving our kids back and forth.

Cohousing solves this problem.  Houses face a pedestrian area and cars are relegated to the periphery.

My daughters had the run of our cohousing neighborhood at age 4 with many friends nearby.  Kids are running around outside in a pack all day in the after school hours and on weekends. Life is spontaneous and free for these kids from a young age without pre-planned play dates.

We know our neighbors, so there's always an adult around or nearby to apply a bandage skinned knee.

It's a wonderful outdoor lifestyle that doesn't have to be something from the past.

- Peter

[Photo by Derek Jensen (Tysto) - Own work, Public Domain]