Cohousing-L Mailing List: Northern california regional conference

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

I am *not* (I'm trying to convince myself here) going to write reams about 
this - so somebody else better give a fuller report.

I was at the Northern California Cohousing Conference in Berkeley most of 
yesterday.  It was very successful.  It was huge!  I gather about 180 
people were registered, and there were a lot of walk-ins too.  So it was 
maybe 250 people or so?  (Perhaps somebody better informed can give 
accurate numbers).  Anyway, it was noticeably bigger than the national 
conference. 

The atmosphere was a little more subdued than in Boulder - I think there 
was a higher proportion of folks at the start of the process, or just 
wanting to be involved, and a lower proportion of people actually living 
in cohousing or well into the building process.  That made for less 
intesity I think.  Plus it's hard to generate as much excitement when you 
just drive there for the day than when you've flown in for the weekend.  
Nonetheless, there was a lot of excitement and interest.

The theme of the conference was sustainability in cohousing.  The keynote
address was by David Early, president of Urban Ecology.  It was very 
inspiring   He basically was urging cohousers to do infill development - 
take parts of the city and make them more livable and more natural, 
rather than building on ag land on the peripheries of urban areas.  He 
had some beautiful slides of good urban redevelopment.  He did a good job 
tying it to cohousing with slides of urban developments such as 
Sacramento St in Berkeley, Southside Park in Sacramento, and N St in 
Davis (plug).

Then there were panels which I won't describe.  The end of the conference 
was a discussion (moderated by Kathryn McCamant) of how to form a 
Northern California regional cohousing association.  People brainstormed 
various ideas of what it could do.  It was pretty obvious that there is a 
need - we've got five communities built and more building who could all 
be doing more sharing information about how to solve problems.  We've 
also got hundreds (if not thousands) of people in the area who are 
interested in cohousing or working on the early stages of the process.  
They need ways to connect up with each other to form groups who agree 
about location and vision.  It was also clear that there is quite a lot 
of energy to get something started.  We got a list of names, and a very 
energetic and competent seeming person took on the task of arranging a 
first organizational meeting.  So I'm optimistic something will happen.

It rather seemed like the managerial side of the conference was taken on 
almost entirely by Don Lindemann.  Much credit to him for doing what must 
have been a phenomenal amount of work to make this happen.  I certainly 
appreciated the results.  I feel like I'm becoming a cohousing conference 
junkie - I just love going and talking to people about what my community 
is like, or what there's is like.  

Stuart.
N St Cohousing
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu