Cohousing-L Mailing List: Intentional Community Types

[Sharon Villines (sharonvillines]

on 7/27/00 12:44 PM, Rob Sandelin at floriferous [at] msn.com wrote:

> There are  some folks who insist that as soon as you do a community
> business, which employs people in the community, you are no longer
> "cohousing" but "an intentional Community".

In Israel there are different words for each of these kinds of communities
-- live cooperatively, live/work cooperatively, work cooperatively. Each way
of interacting requires different compromises and levels of commitment.
People usually know how far they are interested or able to go.

I think a major issue for Cohousing is to be attractive to people who are
clearly not interested in another of the options. The most attractive part
of cohousing when I explain it to others is the lack of ideological vetting.
Everyone seems to like the multigenerational community with both privacy and
group sharing but they don't want to wake up in the morning having to put on
a particular political or social face for the community -- or have others
make decisions about any part of their private lives.

Income sharing, living in a "company town", etc. automatically means that
one is subject to group-think on a deeper level. This is a level of personal
commitment that approaches religious practice. Most people are not looking
for that.

> This notion is perhaps unsettling to the image of cohousing as a
> respectable, middle-class endeavor?

And why wouldn't it be a middle-class endeavor? All the great families (the
rich dynasties) were certainly middle-class endeavors that involved income
sharing, working in family businesses and living in family compounds. The
greater the cohesiveness, the greater the wealth. The R**** (a great Jewish
dynasty I forget the name -- brain sludge) even married within the family.

Sharon
-- 
Sharon Villines, Editor
The MacGuffin Guide to Detective Fiction
http://www.macguffin.net
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington, DC
http://www.takomavillage.org