Re: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 51, Issue 29
From: Donald J Westlight (westlighohsu.edu)
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:32:21 -0700 (PDT)
(regarding self development losses)

Hello Nikki,

We at Cascadia Commons Cohousing in Portland Oregon had similar
problems, though it is now a nice place to live, and you're welcome to
visit if you ever come through town.  

There are several factors to consider (your milage may vary...)

- Co-housing was (and may still be) sufficiently different from generic
construction projects as to be difficult to acquire construction loans. 


- Most potential co-housing "customers" don't tend to have extra pocket
cash.  This means that home sizes tend to be smaller than the median
because that is what co-housing people can afford.

- It follows that a development process which racks up debt will have a
very difficult time passing that debt forward because the larger project
budget will make it more difficult to secure construction loans, and
you'll have fewer eligible buyers who can afford the overhead to make up
the sunk costs.

At Cascadia Commons, the founding LLC members elected to eat the costs
of self development and price the homes normally.  Had we not done so,
we would not have been able to sell the balance of the homes and
therefore most of us would have been bankrupt.  It was better to merely
lose "some" money.  I'll tell you how much over a beer, but it was
roughly the cost of hiring the developer outright.  Self development can
be a humbling experience, and I don't believe any of us would do it
again given a choice.

Eight years after move-in, 12+ years after development began, I'm still
living here, our debts are paid, and I generally enjoy the experience.

     ___

The operative question is "what did we at Cascadia do to keep up morale
and finish the project?"

(1) We had a vision.  We were building an "eco village" based on the
principle of consensus, and have several pages on the topic still.

(2) We committed absolutely to the site, buying, even without all the
permits in place.  Once we committed to a site, it was complete or
disband.  (Foolish, but it wouldn't have happened any other way.)

(3) We had twelve households out of 26 (unwise, but true.) Most of us
dedicated 15+ hours a week, and one of us went full time for several
years.  Self development is work.

(4) We included human dynamics and relationship building into the
meetings themselves.  This included adding an appreciations &
acknowledgments section prior to the close, dedication of about 33% of
agenda time overall to communication skills, group process, and
community building.  Also, we added a "purple card" to the standard card
deck used as shorthand in our consensus decision making process to allow
the processing of strong emotions.  This was necessary to make decisions
which had the potential of causing one or more members to become
bankrupt.  

Our "purple card" works as follows:

- The purpose is to enable people to voice strong emotions which
prevent them from being present attending to business at hand.

- The purple card does not affect the overall flow of the meeting, the
agenda, or the technical process in play.  It is simply a time out for
reflection.  Stuck people become unstuck, and the group as a whole
understands better their part in creating the situation (if any.)  Not
all issues are resolvable this way, but most (in our experience) really
are.

- The purple card is called first, the individual can state what
emotion he/she is experiencing, and a neutral party (or discipline
person) will paraphrase the individual, and ask if that covers it. 
Blaming rants are not allowed and the individual needs to restate until
they can get to an "I statement."  This has a nice self-regulating
effect over time.

- The facilitator will then resume business, or in extreme cases call
for a break or do some other short exercise to get people back on track
with the meeting.

(5) Creativity is encouraged - anything to reduce stress: reading of
poems at closing (I wrote one about a "banker on a stick") songwriting,
etc.  We also renamed the LLC the "unlimited liability corporation."

(6) The most important point however, is a regular summary of current
options and the balance sheet.  Every week we identified the critical
path items and volunteered teams to deal with them.  The group as a
whole owned the job performance and periodically we had to take back
responsibilities and redeploy people.  In this aspect, we were making
business decisions and didn't function as a social club.  


I know this isn't the answer you're looking for.  If you've given up
the site, the only way you can preserve the investment is to keep all
the humans intact and build a project which can adsorb the costs.  This
could not have happened for us.

I'm happy to talk more offline.

-Don Westlight
Cascadia Commons


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:22:38 -0700
From: "Nikki Sachs" <nikkisachs [at] gmail.com>
Subject: [C-L]_ Losses

I am a member of a cohousing group that made some decisions that ended
up
with the group losing some money.   We are wondering if any others
groups
have lost money and if so, how you managed to recoup those losses?  We
are
hoping to roll the loss into a new project and wonder if others have
any
experience along these lines or have other ideas.  Thanks.

----------------------------------------------------------------------



  • (no other messages in thread)

Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.