On a recent summer afternoon, I drove down to Highland, New York, just across the river from Poughkeepsie, and pulled into a tree-lined driveway in a quiet neighborhood. I met three women standing in front of an iron gate: Alyssa Cohen, Maria Reidelbach, and Julie Zuckerman.
"We are standing on the dirt road that lets us into the property, there's a gate, and we walk down a ways," Zuckerman told me as she opened the gate.
We walked along a grassy pathway that sloped down towards a land bridge, with water on either side. That's where this property gets its name: Twin Ponds. Cohen pointed into the distance. "There's a little waterfall down there, that's kind of the end of the property," she said.
"There's a beaver dam now!" added Reidelbach. "It's out on the island. It's so cool."
Cohen grinned. "We've never been to the island," she said.
Twin Ponds is 40 acres total. All of it is, for the moment, undeveloped. No one lives there, unless you count the fish in the ponds, some white-tailed deer and wild turkeys, and the dense patches of oak, hemlock, and maple trees. But for more than five years, Alyssa, Julie, Maria, and a handful of others have been trying to build on it.
After we spent a while walking the grounds, the four of us huddled around a map. "We're going to be building here," Zuckerman said, pointing up at a meadowy slope that overlooks one of the ponds. "The area that we're going to be building on is about three acres of the 40, so we'll be concentrated there. And the idea is that we're going to be sitting on the porch drinking our coffee, and looking out to what is essentially the dreamscape."
All three women have slightly different ideas of what the dreamscape represents. For Cohen, it's mostly practical.
"I originally was looking for trying to figure out what I was going to do in the next stage of life. I am married, but I don't have any children, and I needed to understand how I was going to live once I got older, or older than this, at any rate," she said. "And I was able to hear about something called co-housing, which is a community type living environment. Not a commune, though. I thought that that might be a good fit for me. Co-housing is where there's individual residential units for people that have living room, dining room, kitchen, all you want, but they're positioned in such a way that there can be good interaction among people. And people get to know their neighbors. And in addition, there's usually what you might call 'common house.' Could be a clubhouse, where a lot of social activities can occur amongst the community, and the community themselves. And it's usually in the range of 20 to 40 units that govern themselves and make all the decisions, and they do that usually through some type of consensus. So no strong leader, everybody gets to be in on the decision making."
"It's almost like you're describing like a very small town," I said.
Cohen nodded. "Yes, but smaller. I think in some regards it's like how people used to want to live, where you knew your neighbors."
Neighbors are a big part of what excites Reidelbach about Twin Ponds. "I love the idea of having your own little kitchen, but also sharing a nice big kitchen, so that you can have group dinners. I love potlucks. I love group dinners. I love to entertain. I love good food."
For Zuckerman, Twin Ponds is a bit more idealistic. She came on board shortly after October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters attacked Israel. She wondered if it was possible to build the kind of place that often seems impossible in the real world. "A place where a community that is diverse can come together and reach across those boundaries that usually separate us," she said. "Money stratifies our communities. Let's make it happen!"
And so, for years now, Zuckerman, Reidelbach, and Cohen have been going back and forth with state and local governments, trying to figure out how to build Twin Ponds. Five years in, there's nothing on the property except a small camper and a row boat. They've all invested a lot of their own money into this project - hundreds of thousands of dollars, by their count. The money has gone towards architects, lawyers, and civil engineers. They have to be careful when they talk about it, because when they use their preferred word to describe it - "co-housing" - people think they mean that other thing. The "C-word."
"That's the way people read it," Reidelbach sighed. "And people have, you know...their red flags go up when they hear 'commune.'"
The difference, they say, is that they want to build private homes. Nobody's going to pool their incomes, or be forced to commit to any sort of religious affiliation. It's not that complicated, they insist. And yet they're still a long way from breaking ground. It's a relatively simple idea struggling to come to fruition at a complicated time in America.
"Politically, we feel like so much is absolutely out of control," Zuckerman told me. "I don't want to have control over other people, but I want to be with in control with my neighbors of what's impacting us."
"Anything either of you want to add to that?" I asked.
Reidelbach smiled. "I think she said it."
