Re: Truly affordable cohousing
From: Greg Hope (g_hopeyahoo.com)
Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 13:38:07 -0700 (PDT)
Greetings, Marganne. It's Greg in Washington at this end. Without diving too 
deeply into the affordability discussion, here are a couple suggestions in 
response to your questions below.

At http://www.cohousing.org/mkt/marketplace you will see two categories of 
listings that might be of interest: "Cohousing Groups Seeking New Members" and 
"Land Seeking New Cohousing Group." The good people at Cohousing.org seem to be 
expanding their web offerings to better support communication between 
individuals and groups seeking a match. Of course, initiating this discussion 
thread on cohousing-l has been an effective step toward connecting with others 
having similar goals.

In case you are not already familiar with this, I suggest a visit to 
http://directory.ic.org/records/?action=search&advanced=true where you can use 
IC.org's advanced search tool to identify intentional communities that may have 
some resonance with your vision.

Neither of the above resources specifically address affordability. Although it 
is frequently addressed by cohousing communities, this might be outside the 
"conventional" definition of cohousing (perhaps Craig can speak to this subject 
from the Cohousing.org perspective). At IC.org the available search criteria 
are much more extensive, which is consistent with the great diversity in 
intentional community of which cohousing is only one form. The discussion that 
you have revived may be highlighting the need to expand on the "labor and 
money" criteria included in the IC.org search tool, or to develop and apply 
some definition of affordability. The case might simply be that affordability 
is already being achieved more frequently and effectively in other forms of 
intentional community (e.g., ecovillages) than in cohousing.


<snip>
Can you share some ideas about how to find potential members for this 
type of project? I know there are others out there like me -- a few 
on this list in different geographical areas.

Personally, I haven't connected face-to-face with anyone over the 
past 4 years who wanted to get into cohousing, let alone low-cost 
projects. Perhaps list members and others in existing projects will 
know some people who would be interested?

-- 
Cheers!
Marganne
http://cohousingsmallhomes.blogspot.com/
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