Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Unit selection

[Jim Snyder-Grant (jimsg]

(Joani asked about the unit selection process, when a group is largely 
full and doesn't have full info on prices & configurations.)

New View (Acton MA) was in a similar situation, with the group full, and 
unknowns left in both pricing and exact locations of houses. We had an 
extra level of challenge which I don't know is part of the Old Oakland 
process, which is that because we have a mix of detached and attached 
houses on a hilly site, moving or reconfiguring any one house  on the 
site plan often caused a complex ripple through the rest of the design.

To accomodate this complexity, we had our architects involved in the 
site-choosing process.

The first step was as you outlined: people filled out a survey 
indicating 1st, 2nd and 3rd preferences, along with a survey about what 
factors led them to pick this. We had also agreed a long time ago that 
seniority would be the determining factor in case we couldn't work out a 
solution. Earlier versions of a survey like this had had a heavy 
influence on the site plan, so the architects had a good idea of what 
was coming. 

The architects made some adjustments to acoomodate more people's first 
and second choices, but some issues remained.

People that were interested in areas that were over-subscribed met to 
discuss ways around the issues. In some cases this solved some problems.

Nonetheless, there were some puzzles that were not easily solved. The 
hardest was the shortage of places that were within 200 feet of parking. 
We had a few more households that wanted a situation like this than we 
could stretch the site plan for and still maintain the large car-free 
pedestrian zone we had agreed on.  After some hard work  on the part of 
the group and the architects, the newest household decided to drop out, 
seeing that they could not get the sort of site they determined they 
need. That was a sad day.

I have usually greatly appreciated that New View was heavily subscribed, 
filled up easily, and had very few dropouts. This process was one of the 
down sides. Not only did we lose a household, but we spent a lot of 
group time and architect money to try to manipulate the site plan in 
many many ways to accomodate people's particular needs and preferences. 
In a different world, if we were a standard developer, we would have 
made guesses about what would satisfy enough buyers & be cheap enough to 
make a profit on. Instead we ended up in a spiral of trying to please 
everyone and then ending up with costs so high that everyone was 
burdened. As a related example, since we let every household customize 
their house if they paid for the customization costs, that added a lot 
to construction time, which translated to extra construction costs. Hmm. 
A livable trade-off, all things considered, but definitely a source of 
pain that I hope future groups can do better at.

What would I recommend instead? I'm not sure. Any New Viewers out there 
want to propose how people ought to learn from this experience?  In any 
case, I do agree that trying to work out the speific conflicts in the 
whole group does sound like a losing proposition. We had people  work in 
small groups, and people knew ahead of time that tie-breaking would be 
done by priority, so that people knew the process would not be endless. 


Jim_Snyder-Grant [at] NewView.org

..where we are entering our second year of all 24 housholds being on 
site, we are reviewing common house plans for construction in 1998, we  
are just about to approve our third annual condo budget, and we will 
have a big "beating the bounds" event soon to celebrate the anniversary 
of our land closing & to learn what the boundaries of our fabulous 18 
acres actually look like (old new england stone fences, squooshy 
wetlands, poison ivy, & other thrills..)

Please excuse the mandatory ad that gets appended by my email provider.

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