Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Flawed membership process

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

You experienced a competitive situation and it sounds like you did not like
it. There are a number of ways to determine membership and one of the most
common is who makes out the check first for a downpayment and gets it to the
treasurer. This is not always ideal but its pretty clear.  Odds are high,
you will have turnover sooner than you think, and this will come up again.
Are the people who did  not get the unit on some kind of waiting list? This
situation may come up dozens and dozens of times in a group, and once you
have been through it, and learned that people leave and units come
avaialable from time to time, you will be able to tell anxious potential
members, "Be patient, if you are determined to live here, stay involved in
some level and when someone moves on, you can have that unit"

The turnover for a 6 home community (did I read that right?) will be much
less than a 30 unit community however. I would be interested to understand
more about the challenges of the functioning of such a small community.

Rob Sandelin
Northwest Intentional Communties Association
Building a better society, one neighborhood at a time