Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing Moments

[Jim Snyder-Grant (danasg]

This is Jim Snyder-Grant here, from New View cohousing in Acton MA.

I'm responding to a Feb 15 posting from Sharon Villines. There's a great
big nor'easter snowstorm coming in & so I have time to catch up on old
mail... 

At 08:03 AM 2/15/99 -0600, you wrote:
>I would like to hear from people in up and running communities:
>
>1. What things/people/events do you feel were most instrumental in actually
>getting your project from one stage to another, particularly built?
>2. Which points were the darkest and what got you through them?

Some replies on 1 & 2:

When our first big land deal fell through, at another site in Acton, it was
very important that we had some relatively new member families who were
from Acton. They leaped in & replaced a few burned out members of the land
search / negotiating group. Within a month (I think), we had inklings of a
new site in Acton that eventually became our home. It was a great
handing-over of the torch.

We had a series of setbacks about this new site that kept making the
pro-forma look worse and worse with rising construction prices& no apparent
corresponding rise in appraisals. A choice point came in deciding whether
to go for a 'comprehensive' permit which would have let us bypass local
zoning & use state standards & put many more houses in; or proceed under
the town regulations with fewer houses. It was a complex and heartfelt
process in the group, weighing the costs & benefits of lower cost housing
vs. the risks of pissing off neighbors possibly to the extent of lawsuits
vs. the pros and cons of having more or fewer houses on the life of our
neighborhood-to-be.  It was one of the few times that we fell back to our
voting procedures. 

After the additional financial strain caused by these processes and some
additional cost overruns during the construction process, it was hard to
find the financial will to get the common house built. This we accomplished
in a variety of ways:
1) A tenacious and often contentious common house committee that struggled
mightily and successfully to build a common house that both fit our program
and our 4-year old budget that seemed to many to be too small for our
program. The committee process churned through a number of committee
members, but as with the land search, waves of new volunteers kept coming in. 
2) The creation of various loan funds to help out the most financially
vulnerable households through the process of coughing up the last of the
money needed for the common house. (We had dealt with the development cost
overruns by delaying collecting much of the money that would be needed for
the common house.)
3) We had two rounds of successful fundraising within the neighborhood for
donations to add back in some features of the common house that were
falling off the end of the budget.

And now we have a common house! It's used every day, with a lot of
spontaneous gatherings & potlucks while committees work through creating a
more formal process for meals & events. Today at 2:00PM: A snow day event
has been called for, with hot chocoltae & brownies! 


>3. Has anyone had difficulties with people giving personal guarantees for
>construction loans?
>
We countered the scary bank documents about loan guarantees with side
agreements between community members that any financial loss caused by the
development not working out would be shared EQUALLY, even if the bank chose
to go after a small subset of households.


>Sharon Villines
>Synergy Cohousing
>http://www.cohousing.net
>
>

-Jim Snyder-Grant, using my wife's email to belong to cohousing-l. It is
more relaible to reach me at
jimsg [at] newview.org (home)
or
Jim_Snyder-Grant [at] lotus.com (work)