Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: COHOUSING for profit

[Gordon (weil]

> >The kind of nightmare I envisage is a speculative developer builds a
> >"cohousing" community, complete with common house, community kitchen,
> >appropriately small houses.  Maybe he even sets up bylaws dictating that
> >the decision making procedure be by consensus.  Everybody who buys a
> >house in the development owns part of the CH.  The developer advertises
> >the wonders of cohousing in the local media and manages to sell all the
> >lots to interested people who don't know each other.  Everybody moves
> >in.

Someone please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that the way the Davis, 
CA co-housing community came into being was something very similar to what 
Stuart describes.  And wasn't Davis one of the very first co-housing communities
in the US?  Let's face it, the good side of profit is that it gets things done. 
Somehow I have to believe that a community that builds itself has a healthier 
start, but I am not sure that we need to be purists about this.  A community's 
vision comes in and out of focus as the years pass, and luck plays some part in 
whether a healthy, cooperative culture can maintain itself.  In my own 
(non-cohousing) cooperative community, the culture the founders established got 
lost in a general exodus, only to be regained and, I think, improved upon about 
7 years later during an infusion of highly visionary people.