Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: choosing units

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

>Remember the week or two before your group had the momentous day when each 
>household got to pick a unit for its very own?  How did you handle the 
>swirl of feelings?  Did your group provide space and time for discussion 
>of choices? 
Imagine this! At RoseWind (self developed, with houses individually 
designed and constructed), we already had quite a number of households 
invested, AND our individual lots chosen (fortunately nobody wanted the 
same lot as someone else) when it came time to set the buy-in price for 
each lot, with a spread of about $10,000. 

Our lots were clearly not equal, as real estate, with differences in 
orientation, elevation, some size differences, proximity to streets, 
view, central or peripheral, etc. But we had to consensually determine 
how to price them, relative to each other, and adding up to our required 
development budget. All of them, including the ones that already were 
"ours".

Egad. Some owners were humble and generous, others were wary and wanting 
a good deal. "Yours is more valuable because it's next to the thicket" 
was countered with "But the thicket is a fire hazard!" One person's 
valuable privacy, was another's relative "isolation." Convenient access 
to streets vs exposure to the sounds of traffic. ET CETERA. 

We wisely hired an outside facilitator. And paid him cash out of our 
individual pockets at the meeting. We succeeded. 

Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing
Port Townsend Washington (Victorian seaport, music, art, nature)
http://www.rosewind.org
http://www.ptguide.com
http://www.ptforpeace.info (very active peace movement here- see our 
photo)

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