Cohousing-L Mailing List: The 80% Solution

[Tom Ponessa (tomp]

Russell Mawby writes

On April 6, 1995, in a posting titled "Designing Your Own CoHousing",
Harry Pasternak made some exuberant statements that I feel need clarifying.

Witold Rybczynski, professor of architecture at McGill University does
believe that people should be able to design their own spaces, and in his
book "The Most Beautiful House in the World", he makes his case quite
clearly.  However, I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that he
advocates everyone building their own homes.  Instead, he suggests
(in my reading of his work) that the problem is that most homes built and
traded today are more about marble foyers and jacuzzis than they are about
amenity and "user-friendliness".  His response is a more basic, stripped down
design (like the "Grow Home" that he helped design) that encourages and
allows residents to shape and adapt their homes for their own needs over
time, with the added (and primary) benefit of affordablity.
Yes, the Grow Home has been fairly successful, but has had to be somewhat
gussied up to be more attractive (curb appeal) to the typical home buyer. . .

Also, I think Harry's enthusiasm carried him away, but I can assure
everyone that "80% of all single family detached homes built in Ontario
are" NOT "designed and built by their owners".  Ontario has produced three
of the biggest development companies in the western world, who all made
their millions paving Ontario countryside with single-family homes, among
other things.  I believe the self-build stats are closer to 10%, and includes
kit homes, plan-book designs and vacation cottages, but will confirm this
figure if anyone is interested.  Perhaps the 80% refers to the number of
homeowners who go on to renovate or modify their houses?  Which, to
repeat myself, is really the point of the Grow Home - that most homeowners
can and will put up dividing walls, hang doors, do plumbing especially
if it means saving money on purchase.

The difficulty, as someone else on this list noted (sorry for the
lack of reference), is that building a house is a much different thing than
building a community, not to mention the building codes, planning
considerations that affect even single-family dwellings nowadays.

I wish we _could_ all go out and build our own homes, and I'm glad that
so many are choosing to.  Anyone interested in another take on all this
should look into the Strawbale list at strawbale [at] crest.org.

Russell Mawby - CoHoSoc - russell_mawby [at] tvo.org