Cohousing-L Mailing List: renters policies

[Witten & Fitch (lll]

Is their any community out there with a clear policy about renter use of
commonhouse facilities.

I am particularly interested in laundry use:  are your members billed for
laundry use, and are renters billed at same or higher rate?

We, at Pioneer Valley Cohousing, never anticipated renter use when we set
laundry fees, and now of course we have renters within the community.  Our
renters usually become very active members of the community, so there is a
good deal of reluctance to treat them differently, or unfairly.

To encourage communal laundry use, we had wanted to keep laundry fees low.
So, we had figured that our monthly condo fees would cover machine repairs
and the laundry fees would cover fuel use only.  Last I remember, we were
charging about 10 cents a load!  So in a real way, my condo fees are paying
for someone else's renter depreciating our machines.  And of course, I do
not have the financial gain that the "landlord" gets.

>From Laura, a lonely advocate for raising the costs for renter's use.