Why doesn't cohousing get more national news coverage?
From: Bob Morrison (morrisontook.enet.dec.com)
Date: Mon, 26 Dec 94 19:49 CST
  About a month ago, Barbara Brand posted a blurb here saying that she had
seen a brief article about cohousing in a retirement planning newsletter pub-
lished by Fidelity Investments. I got curious and tried to get a copy of it
from Fidelity. After one false start, I found out that this publication is
available only to employees and retirees of companies that have contracted
with Fidelity for retirement funds (401-K's etc.). I then asked Barbara to
send me a copy of the relevant pages, which she did.
  Frankly, I was disappointed with the article. It presents two options for 
retirees to cut back on housing expenses, cohousing and home sharing. The mater-
ial on cohousing is only one paragraph long. Though they got the facts right,
the material is far too sketchy to do justice to the cohousing movement, and
only one community (New View) is mentioned. There is no contact information for
any of the cohousing organizations. I doubt that more than a few dozen readers 
looked into cohousing further as a result of reading this.
  This issue was published in Sept. 1992. 
  I have been meaning for several months to post some thoughts on the issue of
national press coverage, and this experience has motivated me to do so. De-
spite the great progress the cohousing movement has made, it is getting very
little national press coverage. Why is this so? In this context, I include
all means of getting the word out, not just "news" media.
  In the entire three years I have known about cohousing, I have only en-
countered three or four people who had known about cohousing before I told
them. This excludes people already in cohousing groups. This despite being in
a place (Greater Boston) that has the greatest level of cohousing activity in
the East. The lack of national publicity is IMO one of the major things that
is holding back the cohousing movement. What can we do about this? 
  The ideal thing would be getting coverage on a national TV news or news-
magazine program. This will be a challenge because TV news prefers to focus on
controversy and the highly visual. Though cohousing communities under con-
struction and lived in are highly "visual", the element of controversy is
missing (and hopefully will remain "missing"). The second best thing would be
to get publicity in widely-read national magazines such as Time, Modern Ma-
turity, etc.
  I realize that cohousing has gotten lots of local coverage in areas where
the level of activity is high. This is good, but it's not enough. In Greater
Boston, for example, we have spread the word to only a tiny fraction of the
population. This tiny fraction is enough to fill meetings of the Boston Co-
housing Network to overflowing and to supply The Cohousing Center with a long
list of people hoping to be matched to proto-groups. But it's not enough.
If we could inform ten times more people about cohousing, we would potentially
have ten times more people to draw on. 
  I would like to thank the members of this list who have cited examples of
(mostly local) news coverage of cohousing. If any of you see or hear any 
national press coverage of cohousing, please post a pointer here. I am assum-
ing that for the near future, such publicity will be so infrequent that we can 
cite all occurrences of it without cluttering up this file. 
  Do any of you receive Fidelity Investments' retirement planning newsletter 
"Stages", or a similar newsletter? If so, please watch to see if they publish 
any more material on cohousing. While trying to reach the general public, the
cohousing movement needs to work even harder on reaching constituencies that
are good sources of prospective cohousers, and retirees (including those who
are planning for retirement) are one such consituency.

Bob Morrison

Home: Boxboro, MA               Work: Digital Equipment Corp., Littleton, MA

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