Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: demographics survey

[Steve Farley (sfarley]

Joani B. said,

>Like you, I am also interested in seeing how diverse we are (or are not) in
>regard to race, ethnicity, political orientation, and class background, so
>let's keep talking about these issues. And doing demographic surveys from
>time to time as well.

I would like to volunteer to put together a really comprehensive survey of
built U.S. cohousing communities which goes into tons of details about
things like population demographics, occupation, household incomes, range
of unit sizes & prices, and number of bedrooms, legal status, association
fees and how they are divided, who pays for childcare, what rooms are in
the common house, pool or no pool, pet policies, etc, etc.

Obviously this would be a long questionnaire, and  would take a serious
commitment not just from the surveyor, but also from the respondents. The
hope would be that we could get info from EVERY built community, so I would
love to get a current email address for a willing representative of each
built coho community, so that we can get some statistically significant
info.

The results might be published online and in the journal, and perhaps could
be updated with a new survey of the same questions every two year, to keep
our picture current as we grow. This would be invaluable for communities in
various stages of formation to get a good picture of precedents when an
issue comes up, without having to go scurrying all over the place for the
info. It would also be a great way to get a clearer picture of who is
attracted to cohousing for use in marketing. And I think it would help us
feel more like we are a larger community, not just a lot of little
communities.

So if anyone has ideas about what info they or their group would like to
know about built communities, you can submit them to me at:
sfarley [at] igc.apc.org

I will formulate a draft survey and post it here for comments once I have
it drawn up. And please also contact me if you are willing to answer the
survey for your built coho group--that is the link where this survey could
potentially fail--if we don't get enough groups fully responding.

Or am I way off base? Do other folks think this would be a good idea?

Thanks,
Steve

Steve Farley
Tucson Neighborhood Development Corporation, Tucson, AZ
29 households with 41 adults and 18 kids
extremely close to controlling a fabulous site in central Tucson
http://www.igc.apc.org/tndc/