Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Sustainable ag and cohousing

[King Collins (greenmac]

Dear Joel and cohousers:

Thanks, Joel, for the response and update on Jewel Hill. I think there are
others watching the coho list that appreciate hearing how things are going
in Sonoma County.

>Last September, in response to a query on getting around rural
>zoning, I posted an idea intended to strengthen urban boundaries,
>called the Urban-Rural Dipole, in which farms just outside city
>limits would be tightly linked to cohos within the city limits as
>both consumers and grower participants.  An anticipated obstacle
>to that idea was the difficulty of a cohousing group reaching
>agreement on two sites when it was so difficult to establish a
>single residential site.

This is a valuable notion and close to many of our thoughts about how our
society should grow. I anticipate the time when zoning laws are modified to
fit a new model of mixed use that is compatible with the vision of
cooperative sustainable living.

Pardon me if I am going back over material you have already discussed, but...

Are you saying that you want to strengthen the separation between community
and farm? Or is it that zoning laws make it difficult to do both together?
Clearly agribus with heavy chemicals and massive equipment is
inappropriate, but light, labor intensive garden farms would mix, would
they not?

Doesn't this model also include some industrial projects mixed with the
rural and residential, so that communities can contain workshops, retail
stores, garden/farms, and residences, all within walking distance?
(Disruptive, noisy or harmful projects would be placed elsewhere)

Of course this is a model that is out of reach for most of us at this date.

But later or under different circumstances, perhaps.....

Has anyone heard of a group buying a town and setting up the zoning laws
for sustainable living?

>A brief experience with a CSA has given us some healthy
>skepticism of that mechanism, but it may be that some variant of
>the CSA will prove workable.

Could you tell us more about your experience and what problems you had, and
perhaps how it could be better?

King Collins

P.S. Are there any cohousing conferences planned for Northern California?