Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Parking

[Mac Thomson (ganesh]

Lynn Nadeau at RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend Washington, recently
wrote a post talking about the parking there at Rosewind.  She said that
due to fire safety issues, etc, they were forced to have cars accessable
to all homes.  Her conclusion was basically:
> 
> I wouldn't recommend TRYING to have at-home parking, but know that it
> can work just fine.

Her post has gotten our group talking about parking again.  After our
Site Design Programming with Chuck Durrett, we felt pretty strongly that
cars should not be parked at any homes, except in the case of a disabled
member.  Since then, however, we have had some older folks take a look
at joining our group who are definitely concerned about our plans for
remote parking (between 50' and 400' from all homes).

We are mostly a younger group with most members in their 30's and 40's
and the idea of walking a few hundred feet in the glorious Colorado
sunshine to our cars is just fine.  But some of the older folks
considering us think more of that bone chilling Colorado snow.  We don't
want to let our current youthful perspective lead us to neglect the
needs of older members, but we also don't want to compromise on parking
if it would have a significant negative impact on the life of our
community.

On our site, we do have the opportunity to provide at home parking for
at least a third of the homes without having the cars actually enter the
village cluster.  So there really isn't an issue with the cars
"violating" the pedestrian space.  The threat is that the people with at
home parking would be able to invisibly go right from their cars to
their homes and miss the opportunity to intereact with the rest of us on
their walk from the parking lot to their homes.

What's been the experience of those of yo who have lived in cohousing
for a while now?  Is that opportunity for interaction between homes and
parking pretty important?  How hard is it for your older members to from
home to parking?

-- 
           Mac Thomson                   San Juan Cohousing
           ganesh [at] rmi.net                Durango, Colorado
            Web Site:   http://www.rmi.net/~ganesh

 "A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on."
                           - Carl Sandberg