The parts that make it a village.

A dozen small homes on a parcel is a subdivision. What makes it a village is everything the homes share. This is the shared half of the plan.

The common house is the heart

Cohousing communities in the United States have converged on a simple, proven idea: a common house — a shared building, supplemental to the private homes, designed for daily use. The Cohousing Association describes it as typically holding a kitchen, a dining/great room, a sitting area, and often a workshop, library, exercise room, crafts room, and guest rooms. Our plan follows that template closely: a real kitchen for shared dinners, a long table, a movie wall, a guest room so nobody has to keep a spare bedroom they use twice a year, and the kind of internet you can run a video call on without apologizing.

On the common-house model: Cohousing Association — the Common House.

The shop

For a village of makers, the shop may matter as much as the common house. The plan is a genuinely equipped shared workshop — woodworking, welding, electronics, a soldering bench, and a large-format 3D printer of the kind Tiny Hacker House already operates. The economics are obvious once you say them out loud: nobody needs to personally own a band saw, a welder, and a planer that each get used a few times a year. Tools get shared, maintained, and actually used; skills get shared alongside them. This is the part of the village that most directly answers the affordability problem for people who make things for a living.

On Tiny Hacker House’s existing shop tools and maker-space history: VoyageAustin, “Meet Anil Pattni”; anilpattni.com; linkedin.com/in/anilpattni.

The garden

Raised beds, fruit trees, a compost system, a tool shed, and — not a small thing in a Texas summer — shared shade. The garden is run by whoever wants to run it and feeds whoever needs feeding. It is low-tech, high-return community infrastructure: the place where neighbors end up talking to each other without a meeting being scheduled.

Energy: grid plus solar

Power comes from Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative, the member-owned utility headquartered right in Bastrop County that has served Central Texas since 1939 and lists Cedar Creek explicitly in its service territory. On top of grid service, the plan puts solar on every roof that can carry it — small, efficient homes with modest loads are well suited to rooftop PV, and a village-scale approach can share the design and installation learning across every unit.

Electric service and territory: Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative; Wikipedia.

Water and wastewater, done properly

Water is planned through Aqua Water Supply Corporation, the non-profit member cooperative in Bastrop that serves most of Bastrop County and parts of six neighboring counties — roughly a 1,200-square-mile territory and more than 30,000 connections — with a backup well as a contingency for grid-weekend resilience.

Water supply: Aqua Water Supply Corporation.

Wastewater is handled by an On-Site Sewage Facility (OSSF) — the formal Texas term for a septic system — permitted through Bastrop County under rules delegated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That means a licensed site evaluator’s soil study, an engineered design where required, county permitting before construction, and a maintenance contract for any system with secondary treatment. Clustering homes lets the village plan its septic capacity deliberately instead of one household stumbling into it at a time.

OSSF / septic permitting: Bastrop County On-Site Sewage Facilities; TCEQ OSSF program.

The written community agreement

Every shared thing needs a rule for how it’s shared, and the plan is to write those rules down before anyone moves in — a short, plain-language community agreement that states what’s shared, what’s private, what a resident commits to, and how decisions get made. This is not bureaucracy for its own sake; it’s the document every co-op and HOA wishes it had written twenty years earlier. Cohousing practice leans toward resident self-management and consensus-style decision-making rather than a distant board, and that is the posture we intend to adopt.

On resident management and decision-making in cohousing: The Cohousing Association of the United States.

What shared life actually looks like

Instead of describing it in the abstract, here is a real, established intentional community explaining how its shared model works day to day — a useful window into the rhythm the village is aiming for.

Third-party video: “Milagro Cohousing: Intentional Community and Ecological Stewardship” by AZPM, on YouTube. Shown for reference; not affiliated with Small Home Village.