Re: Cutting Housing Costs
From: Martin Tracy (mtracyix.netcom.com)
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 95 14:06 CDT
(In response to Bill Paiss' response to Harry's post about sweat equity.)

Hi Bill!  My wife Mardi and I are option holders in Phase 2 of the Sharingwood 
cohousing community.  Since we plan to implement what Harry suggests, I thought 
I would take the opportunity to respond to your message to him.

First of all, we recognize that sweat equity isn't for everyone.  Then again, 
neither is cohousing ;-)

>>Suggesting that people can cut the cost of their housing by 40-70% by buying
>>the materials and building it themselves ignores several critical things.

>- People must have both the time and experience to build a house themselves.

This can be learned.  Mardi and I attended two summer camps on house building, 
which included a lot of on-site building of real houses.  The total cost was 
about $4,000 (for both summers for both of us), and provided great summer 
vacations, with homemade cooking, challenging work, and interesting teachers.
Neither of us had any construction experience prior to the camps.  We knew that 
we wanted to build our own house, and that building it ourselves would bring us 
great satisfaction, and would save us a lot of money.

>- When calculating the cost they don't include their time.  

We are allowing a full year to build the house.  We will not be making any 
money 
during this time.  When we're done, we will fully own lot and house.  So we are 
"out" whatever we would have chosen to earn that year.  On the other hand, we 
will save about $400,000 by not having a mortgage!

>- It assumes that people have enought money or credit to purchase the
>materials since very few banks, if any,  in this country will make a loan on
>an owner-built CoHousiong community.

Yes, true.  People interested in sweat equity should start saving immediately! 
We've been saving many years by foregoing such items as cable TV, microwave 
ovens, dish washers, European vacations...  Fortunately, we haven't given up 
anything important.  The savings go into US treasuries, which have consistently 
been earning 7.75% or more for years and years.  If you have read, "Your Money 
or Your Life" by Dominguez and Robins, this will all sound familiar.   

>Perhaps you have some different laws in Canada that encourage this kind of
>savings.  I wish we could say the same here in the US.

What we're doing is perfectly legal, simple (not easy), and available to anyone 
interested, at almost any income level.  It requires neither government 
subsidies, nor any onus on the part of the community.  It takes no special 
background.  Mardi and I both had dancing careers, although we have both since 
self-educated ourselves into more lucrative technical work.  For some, it will 
take longer than others to save the money.  It has taken us about five years.  

>The issue of sweat equity is one that we have been struggling with since we
>began.  I would love to hear from groups that have been even partially
>sucessful with sweat equity on individual homes within their communities.

Sharingwood is one of the very few cohousing groups to make this form of sweat 
equity possible.  Groups following Chuck and Katie's model too closely build 
all 
houses at roughly the same time, and the economics make it difficult for some 
members to "build their own" on their own schedule.  I'm told that several of 
the eleven homes currently built at Sharingwood were constructed in part or in 
whole by the families living in them.

Of course, cohousing groups could be organized around the purchase of the land, 
leaving the houses to be the responsibility of each family, within certain 
architectural guidelines, and on no particular schedule.  Sharingwood was 
organized this way. 



-- 
Martin Tracy, Los Angeles
mtracy [at] ix.netcom.com

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