Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Cohousing and car sharing

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

I got a bit of criticism for my take on cohousing. You have to understand,
For the last 5 years, pretty much once a month I visit a new community
somewhere in the US. Some of them are cohousing, most are other kinds of
Intentional Community. So I have a pretty broad prospective of how cohousing
does things compared to other kinds of community, and have a fairly large
cross section of experiences to compare and contrast various kinds of
communities against one another. Add to that a decade of my own IC living
experiences and I think I have a bit of perspective.

Generally speaking, cohousing residents seem much less likely to co-own a
car than other types of communities where co-ownership of major things is
more prevelent. Does not mean it could never happen in cohousing, just that
it does not happen much, and for somewhat obvious reasons. Its not the goal
of cohousing residents to share ownership of their homes, cars or incomes.
In fact, the non-sharing of those things is a big atraction to cohousing
residents, who tend to be very middle class in their values. This is not a
value judgement, it is how it is. If you took my comments to be negative,
you took them the wrong way.

Rob Sandelin
Northwest Intentional Communties Association
Building a better society, one neighborhood at a time