Cohousing-L Mailing List: Buying a coho unit and renting for a few years...

[Adelaide Nye (anima77]

Dear Coho-L members:

May I ask for your experience and opinions about an unusual approach we are 
considering for how to arrive at life in a co-housing community (already 
built) in about four years.  We very much want to live in co-housing, but 
have to figure out how to do it from a somewhat different angle.

My husband and I live in the San Francisco area.  We married recently and 
prior to that neither of us were able to buy a home; it's expensive 
here.  Now it is downright impossible to do so; prices are just ridiculous, 
approaching $900,000 for a house -- and we don't want to live that way in 
any event. We like co-housing very much and have visited 8 projects in the 
last two years. Yet we have good work that we enjoy and have decided to 
stay here for about four more years.

In the meantime, by pooling our incomes we now could afford to buy into 
co-housing.  But there is no co-housing in this area that would permit us 
to stay in our jobs. The commutes are terrible and our work is kind of 
specialized. We are not going to look for new jobs in the San Francisco 
area.  Uultimately, we plan to move to the Northwest.

Have any of you had experiences (good or bad) with folks who bought into 
co-housing, but didn't live there until later?  We were thinking that we 
might want to see if co-housing communities were open to us renting it to 
others for four years.   Having actively read this list for more than 1.5 
years (2nd half of '98 through all of '99), I know that we'll learn a lot 
from your responses to this idea.

We want to hear your thoughts on the "plusses and minuses" of the concept-- 
both for the community, and for us.  If you can illustrate your comments 
with real live experience, please do so, or let us know where you are 
"coming from". That would be so helpful and will play a pivotal role in how 
we approach this.  We want to thank you in advance for your thoughts.

Kind regards to all, Adelaide