Cohousing-L Mailing List: intentional communities and cohousing differences

[Rob Sandelin (Exchange) (Robsan]

Mike of planet boulder did a nice job of summarizing Intentional Communities 
in a previous message.  I would only comment that in my neck of the woods, 
being defined as WA and OR, the IC's tend to be developed organically over 
time rather than planned out and built all at once, tend to be built by the 
residents rather than paid professional contractors, and also tend to be 
relatively to considerabily lower income than typical built all at once 
cohousing projects. 

 The average living expense that I see in the situations available ads in 
the NICA newsletter runs between $3-500 per month. That's for room, food, 
etc.    My understanding is that typical cohousing mortgages run in the 
$7-900 a month range, and that's just for the mortgage, food, utilities and 
the rest are obviously more. I know of Mortgages in Cohousing requiring 
payments of $1200 a month,  hardly low income.  And since Cohousing is so 
closely tied to  commerical banks, they screen out anyone who doesn;t have 
the income levels, or  approved work situations.  

>From listening to three years of comments from players on all sides of the 
discussions the difference in income requirements, defined often in terms of 
class issues, is one of the major division points between cohousing and 
other types of intentional communities.  

This division is only one of several within the movement as whole, and there 
is a whole history of various types of communities ranking on others, 
sometimes subtly, sometimes directly.  It seems to be a standard human issue 
to beleive that YOUR system is the best one, thus others are inferior in 
some way.  I remember at one gathering where a religous commune was waving 
its flag really high, and a feminist community very gently, but directly 
nailed them for being patriarchial and sexist.  Both sides didn't have much 
to say to each other after that, although the lunch discussion about the 
general issue of patriarchy in community was worth listening to!

Anyway, the point of all this I want to make is that cohousing is only one 
form of community out there and if you find it does not appeal to you, don't 
give up on community, look into the other alternatives.  The Fellowship for 
Intentional Community (FIC) publishes an excellent quarterly magazine called 
communities, (I would think it was excellent, even if I didn't write for 
it), and they also just published a directory of intentional communities 
available post paid for $23 from  Directory, RT 4 box 169-r  Louisa, VA 
 23093.

Rob Sandelin
Northwest Intentional Communities Associaiton
Sharingwood