Cohousing-L Mailing List: Coho Development "Loan Success Rate"

[John Major (themajors]

I would very much like to have some historical information about
Cohousing projects across the US and their record of paying back their
construction loans. By "Loan Success Rate" I mean from the Bank's point
of view - that is, the world is All As It Should Be when they get their
loan paid back, with interest, on time, and they can go on to the next
thing. Clearly bankers spend a lot of time on "worst case scenarios",
and our bank is certainly fretting about suddenly having a defaulted
cohousing project on their hands to sell off. 

My intuitive sense is that NO cohousing development, *once it received
construction financing*, has failed to repay that loan. The Benicia
development was a sad story from what I hear (nailed by the CA real
estate collapse), but I don't think they ever got a construction loan.
Do any of you know of a coho development that got a loan and failed to
pay it back? Are there some skeletons in the closet?   ;-)  Certainly,
from the "war stories" I've heard, the road has been bumpy, but the
point we want to make to our bank is that the fanatical committment of
the Heroic Model means that there is nearly zero risk that the
development won't get built, once it is started.

So - does anyone out there have a list of cohousing developments, their
banks, and their completion dates? If one of you lurking Coho
consultants have already compiled this info, we'd gladly pay you for it.
Anything for banker's warm and fuzzies!

John Major
Wasatch Cohousing. Salt Lake City, UT
...where we, having worked hard over the winter to study our costs and
design, thought we'd escape the obligatory "sticker shock" meeting(s) -
but hey, there's nothing like a real bid from a real subcontractor to
bring it home!