Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: "Gawkers" at cohousing communities

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Bob Morrison writes:

> 2. It's often hard to know who to contact in advance when visiting a coho
> community, because of their informal organizational structure. If I were
> planning to visit a coho community, I would go to the trouble of finding
> out who to contact, and make a serious effort to contact that person(s) in
> advance and get invited to visit, or at least get clearance to walk the
> grounds on my own if I could not arrange a formal visit at a time that was 
> doable for me. But what if I were sent, on a week's notice, on a business
> trip to a distant city and wanted to visit a coho community while there? If 
> I could not find and contact the right people in time, I would be tempted to
> walk the grounds uninvited.

My inclination is to say "tough luck".  Just because a person is not able to 
contact someone at the community in time does not give them the right to 
trespass on the community's property.  There is nothing about cohousing that 
should give strangers any unusual expectation of access.

>  Are you (Rob) saying that any visitor who is not known to most of the 
> residents of a cohousing community should be escorted by a resident(s) at 
all
> times when visiting the site? If so, this raises another issue, which is 
that 
> escorting guests could use up a lot of people's time.

This seems unnecessary to me.  We frequently have guests of residents staying 
in the community.  Often if I see people I don't recognize wandering around 
I'm inclined to go up and introduce myself.  Usually they will say "Oh, we're 
visiting X and Y" or whatever - most (nice) people feel defensive about being 
in someone elses place and are quick to explain.

This is altogether different from somebody who is quite uninvited by anyone 
wandering around.

That said we (N Street) are pretty open to visitors coming on short notice 
because we don't get that many of them - we like folks to come and see us.  
However, Muir Commons is sort of the paradigm case of a community that has 
gotten massive media attention and constantly has people (invited and 
uninvited) showing up to look around.  I have the impression that they have 
become pretty tired of it.

Stuart.


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Stuart Staniford-Chen           |       Dept of Computer Science
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu            |       UC Davis, Davis, CA 95616
(916) 752-2149  - work          |               and
(916) 756-8697  - home          |       N St. Cohousing Community
Home page is http://everest.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/home.html