About Us

Meet Our Members

  • I’m a native Michigander who lived in Los Angeles for thirty years before moving into Oak Park Commons in January 2026. I took an early retirement from my public librarian position, and selected Oak Park as my new home. It fit the bill for what I wanted: somewhere a bit quieter, but still active and cultured, with high walkability. My interests include nature, animals, literature, art, and architecture. I am thrilled to make my home in an area with such a wealth of historical architecture.

    I found OPC through our website and real estate listings, and was immediately drawn to the philosophy and vision. I loved the idea of having instant friends and support upon moving to my new home. It is wonderful to be part of a group that plans and cares for their building and community together. Our group activities, such as community meals and cultural outings, has helped me, as an introvert, be more social - an important element of wellbeing. 

  • Karen

    Karen was born and raised in Florence, SC.  Her love of dancing and acting took her to Virginia Commonwealth University to study acting and theater arts. She next moved to New York City to make films. Then on to Los Angeles working for years with children at the Blind Children’s Center. Later Karen started a healthy catering business “Heart’s Content.”   During these years, Karen resumed studies in acting and became an avid Ashtanga yoga student, soon adding Tai Chi to the movement mix. Involvement with an LA Ashram gave her communal experience. Also the creation of a busy yoga studio as well as a “produce buying club” for 36 families were both community-oriented activities. 

    Jon
    Jon was born in Lowell, MA and grew up in a rural North Carolina mill town. Wanting to pursue his interest in the visual arts, Jon attended the Atlanta College of Art. Upon graduation he took advantage of a French Government Scholarship to study printmaking in France. Returning, he relocated to NY City to study at NYU’s Graduate Institute of Film & TV.  Jon discovered that his real love was photography and decided to move his business to Asheville, NC.  

    Jon and Karen had been close friends in New York and after 46 years of not being in touch they were reconnected!  They married and have lived in the Asheville mountains for the past nine years.  

    Karen & Jon: 

    More than ever we share the importance of community support and participation in our world. We are thrilled to have found OPC and don’t think it was by accident. We look forward to getting to know this community while sharing and participating with our neighbors. We both are full of appreciation and are happy to have this desirable, unique choice.

  • Hélène
    He was not a GI, only a noisy ebullient History Professor enjoying some sort of sabbatical interlude in the beautiful city of Paris. Except for this detail though, our encounter, soon followed by my departure from the beautiful city to start a new life in the United States, resembles a post World World II romance. Not the most likely script for a member of a feminist periodical who swore she fancied living in a city or in the countryside but never, never in a suburb.
    Forty years later, here we are in a house we love, with a yard where we grow weeds, flowers and vegetables (in that order). We have a daughter, now in her thirties, who lives in California. My husband is still doing research and writing about Carnival and Carnival-like festivities in Europe and the Americas, past and present. He retired in 2002. Throughout the years since I immigrated to the United States I have taught French and between 1997 and 2012 I was involved in collaborative oral history projects in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, a story too long to detail.

    Sam and Hélène
    So what kind of people are we, what do we like to do?   We like to start the morning  with Paul Abel’s Latin jazz on the radio, breakfasting with a semi-dance. We like to recite poetry, we watch movies on Saturday evenings with a friend, we listen to NPR, the BBC, Democracy Now and France Culture. We love to cook. We hate to take care of all the practical and administrative tasks that proliferate like cancerous cells and we are always late in doing it. We garden. We spend time with friends, physically or  electronically. Sam still plays tennis. Helen reads a lot, works at keeping alive parts of her life in France and walks and does her stretches when she finds the time. We like to reflect and speculate about all sorts of things. We like camping. We are concerned with what’s happening here and in the world, especially about the destruction of the natural world; we can’t be as active as we were at a younger age but we do our best to support a number of organizations we believe in. 

    And now we are embarking on this new cohousing adventure. We look forward to the joys and irritations of daily interactions with our cohousing partners; to sharing pleasures and concerns, theirs and ours, from meals taken together to other projects and activities that will develop organically. We like that the people in this group are diverse, in their life experiences and ages. We are very impressed to see that the process by which decisions are made by consensus works as efficiently as it does. We can feel that there is a lot of trust and how much it helps that the developer who oversees the construction of the building is one of us. At our breakfast table the two of us sometimes discuss utopian ideas. What about finding ways to share a few cars so that some of us don’t even have to own a car anymore? What about a poetry group? Collective composting of all our food related waste? All of that is for later days though. Right now our building is rising and our group’s energies are focused on the tasks at hand. We are happy to participate in this project. In the present period when all sorts of forces push us collectively toward isolation and helplessness, more than ever, communities matter.

  • Heather and I are both Oak Park bred. We were high school athletes. I still play competitive soccer. Although childhood schoolmates, we did not date for 20 years. We are passionate travelers visiting places inside and outside the US. No matter how attractive a place seems we always return to Oak Park.

    Heather started out in advertising, left to teach primary and middle school and was eventually promoted to administration. Tragically, at 41, Heather suffered a severe Ischemic Stroke. Despite paralysis she eventually learned to use her left hand well enough to paint watercolor paintings worthy of display in art shows and galleries.

    After college I started a home remodeling company. I started out with modest home improvement projects and after three decades have graduated to constructing commercial and mid-rise residential buildings. Several of these projects exist in Oak Park.

    We learned about cohousing from a friend and attended our first public meeting in 2018. We visited several cohousing communities in Madison, Wisconsin that summer and I saw how people created the kind of sharing community we hoped to join. We are working hard with other members to make a cohousing community in Oak Park.

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  • My husband and I greatly enjoyed the three years we lived in married graduate student housing: sharing resources with other grad student families, setting up babysitting, tool, and living room-based food co-ops, and creating a strong and fun community. Cohousing, a relatively new concept at that time, sounded like a related way to have similar, longer-term, relationships with neighbors, so I started to pay close attention to articles about it.

    In 2021, I was suddenly widowed and found I didn’t like living alone in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where we'd made our home for twenty years. Serendipitously, I learned about plans for cohousing at Oak Park Commons. Two of our three adult children are based in Chicago; proximity to both O’Hare and Midway airports takes me much closer to the rest of my extended family, so Oak Park is a perfect combination of location and intentional community for me. I'm able to continue my long-time AFS high school exchange student volunteer work, I walk or take public transit to many useful and/or wonderful places, I've found a compatible new group of ukulele-playing friends, and I'm loving the richness of figuring out our cohousing lifestyle - together.

  • An accidental encounter at a Catholic singles dance at the Disneyland hotel led to one thing after another. Susan the elementary teacher and Charlie the doctoral student got married, spent a couple of years in a Santa Monica commune and migrated to Ames, Iowa studying Sociology and teaching urban planning. Chicago beckoned with its rowdy politics and cosmopolitan squalor. After a decade and with their four -year-old Gina in tow they found Oak Park.


    Community lovers, they discovered cohousing on a 2017 trip to Amsterdam seeking shared housing alternatives. Susan, the organizer, found others willing to undertake a cohousing project in Oak Park. Conversations led to meetings led to field trips led to proposals. Sites were found. Projects proposed. Hopes were dashed over and over again. Then it happened. Members invested serious money, purchased a site and built 839 Madison Street. We moved in on December 23, 2026. 

  • We are midwestern gals: Anne raised in Iowa and Mary on the plains of the Dakotas. We are both retired teachers. We met 2016, and married in 2019, joining our dog and cat households. Who finds true love and marries in our 60s?? We did! We still can’t believe our good fortune!

    Anne is a painter. Mary loves to travel and enjoys taking cooking classes when she travels. Mary started a book club here, and organized the first Raging Grannies and Friends in the region. We are both avid readers, and we both sing in choirs. Anne is active supporting Palestinian concerns, and active in her church’s Mission team.

  • My parents did not provide me with any siblings and I never acquired any on my own, so I have no nieces or nephews. Married twice and lots of heterosexual dating before and between but no children I know of. Of course, no grandchildren. I found my extended family here and still looking for a life partner.

    I became a political liberal and religious Atheist in adolescence. In my youth, put time and effort in civil rights and peace causes. Then, successful career in computers and investing. Now, my Unitarian Church put me on the Board and I support causes with cash and put my time into my hobby of photography. 

  • Having grown up on a farm, being outdoors and physically active has always been important to me.  At age 86, I continue to swim, practice yoga, and bicycle on my safe, solid “Townie”, and garden whenever I can.  When sitting still, I read and learn, and am writing ‘legacy stories’ with the help of others.  Finding fun and laughter has become my new mission as I age. 

    My favorite feature of our cohousing development is the planned rooftop garden, and the other community-building spaces.  Being able to balance private time with the friendship of neighbors of all ages is appealing to me, along with the mission of our cohousing community to practice sharing resources and talents with interesting and diverse people and living as sustainably and collaboratively as possible.

    I am retired from a career in counseling and consultation about early child and family development, infancy in particular, and look forward to young families joining our cohousing community.  My three children, two step-children and six grandchildren are the loves of my life, and I hope that many of my new cohousing neighbors become my even more extended family.

  • Sheila
    I have lived in Oak Park over 40 years and joined the Oak Park Commons Cohousing Community in 2019, along with my spouse Sean Taylor. Reluctant at first because I greatly value alone time, I soon realized that with cohousing I can have both privacy and a rich social life. I'm happy that I've simplified my life by reducing the space I occupy and by tossing unneeded, unnecessary stuff.

    Born into a large family in the southwest Chicago suburbs, I love the diversity of Oak Park and all it offers. I’m a long-time member of the League of Women Voters local chapter and greatly respect its active leadership. I try to stay physically active and enjoy walking briskly to my local destinations, leaving my car in the garage for suburban outings. Also, I appreciate that my YMCA is nearby but also offers many cardio and strength videos for home usage, including fun dancing options. 


    Sean
    Born in Wisconsin, weaned in Maywood, I’ve lived in Boston, San Francisco, Paris and Memphis. As a young man, I lived in an urban commune in Cambridge, MA. I found it to be an intriguing, engaging, trust building experience that rewarded me with some lifetime friendships.

    I first read about cohousing in the WSJ 25 years ago and was delighted to find this group working on the creation of a cohousing community here. The evolution of a supportive, engaging, sharing community is very exciting to me. There is still much to be defined, created, solved and resolved about the workings of our community, but the thought of working with sincere people toward that end is invigorating.