Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Should individual "sponsorship" be allowed of community

[Howard Landman (howard]

> I can tell you that it's *NEVER* the poorest
> family that blocks consensus on spending money.

Maybe "poorest" is a bad term.  It seems to be heavily emotionally
loaded for you.

I don't honestly know the exact income of any household in our community.
What I do know is that we have at least one family who hasn't paid their
dues for some time now.  I don't know which family that is.  I don't have
any idea whether they simply foolishly over-extended themselves in order
to get into cohousing, or whether some unforeseeable change in their
circumstances forced this course of action upon them.

I also know that, when we took an anonymous survey on "how much money per
month would your household be willing to contribute towards unfinished
capital projects?", there were several answers of zero.  Since the major
capital projects are all related to the common house or common areas that
are owned equally by each household, the fair way to divide the cost is
by household.  But if we also follow the principle that we shouldn't ask
anyone to pay more than they can afford, then we can't fund anything at
all in that manner.  The people on the low end are in effect controlling
the entire capital expenditure process.  And these aren't expensed items,
but capital investments that should improve the value of the commons and
therefore make everyone's units more valuable should they ever choose to
sell.

> If you structure your HOA dues so that everyone can reasonably pay
> them, (again, we've done this for 10 years) there's absolutely no
> reason why any particular family would block consensus on the basis
> of their inability to pay.

I believe that statement to be false.  I'm on the finance committee and we
busted our butts last year to make everything as scrupulously fair as we
could and as low as possible without underfunding reserves.  Yet we still
have the zeros.  Somebody has some kind of reason.

> What price is too high to pay for equality? Shall we just throw out the idea
> of consensus entirely because you think it might be inconvenient?

No, the decision here seems to be to live with the inconvenience and try to
find other ways to pay for things.  But one consequence of that is that it
now looks like it will take more than 30 years to completely finish off the
CH basement.  I don't really plan to be here that long, so I'll probably
never see it happen.  That kind of timescale was NOT part of the original
vision for the community.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, CO
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