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

[Howard Landman (howard]

I wrote:
>> I'm not particularly fond of kleptocracy no matter how it's disguised.

> How about disguising it as taxes that moderate-income people pay and rich
> people don't?

I don't particularly see what that has to do with cohousing, but if you
read my statement and are able to do the tiniest bit of logical inference
I think you'll be able to deduce my position on that as well.

One of the most profound books I've read recently was Jared Diamond's
"Guns, Germs, and Steel".  He makes a convincing case that all governments
are kleptocracies by definition, but what distinguishes a good one from
a bad one is the degree to which it spends what it steals for the benefit
of the people.

Cohousing is not a government.  It doesn't have the legal right to
redistribute wealth against the will of the individuals involved.

> I've told you some options, and you're too invested in proving me "wrong" to
> hear it. 

I found some of them personally unacceptable, but that doesn't mean they
wouldn't work for someone else.

> What, by the way, entitles you to a finished basement, anyway?
> If your group can't afford it, it can't afford it. Live with it.

Our original vision for the community was to finish off the basement
(and certain other things) in fairly short order, say, within five
years of move-in.  We kept saying that were going to save money by doing
a lot of the work ourselves instead of just having the developer do it.
This was partly in the name of affordability.  I personally had no
illusion that this was going to happen without significant expenditures
which all of us would share, but apparently other people had trouble
dividing $75,000 by 34.  $10 a week per household would cover it.

> The only people who get everything they want are the extremely rich,
> and they are doing so by stealing from the poor.

Yawn.  "The extremely rich" are a very diverse group.  There are many
who consider the rest of mankind as merely sheep to be sheared, but
there are also many extremely honest people who worked very hard and
maybe had a bit of luck as well.  Gordon Moore of Intel, to give just
one example.

And even Bill Gates doesn't get EVERYTHING he wants.  He doesn't own
Intuit or Oracle yet.  :-)

> Sound too socialist for you, Sue? Too bad. I can't imagine why you think
> that's a bad thing, or, frankly, why either of you would even consider
> living in cohousing. Sharing seems to be difficult for you.

I've studied the history of early American "socialisms" (the term meant
"communes" until Marx came along) quite a lot.  Most failed; a few
(like Oneida) succeeded.  I also visited, and considered joining,
a commune in the 1970s.  I know what a commune is.

Cohousing is not a commune.  It's an intermediate step.

> Do you all *use* the common house exactly equally?

No, that's why some cost items in our budget are allocated by person,
some by household, some by square footage, and some by external surface
area.  And some are metered.  It's more fair that way, even though it's
more work for the finance team.

Anyway, whether we all *do* use it equally is irrelevant.  We all have
equal shares and equal *rights* to use it.  If someone sells their unit
and their rights, the new owner may have very different usage patterns
from the old one.

>> I see "ability to pay" as a somewhat squishy
>> concept which is often strongly influenced by voluntary personal choices
>> (whether to go to college, what career to choose, how frugal to be,
>> how many children to have, eat out or cook at home, ...).

> ...whether or not you're born white, whether your parents can afford to pay
> for college, whether your company lays you off, whether you're gifted
> intellectually, whether you have a disability, whether you were born in the
> wrong country, etc.

Argue for your limitations, and they are yours.  There's a guy with no legs
who climbed El Capitan in Yosemite.  There are lots of non-white immigrants
with dirt-poor parents, who never went to college, who are millionaires now.

Anyway, I don't see a factual disagreement here.  There are factors within
people's control, and factors without.

> Your point is irrelevant.

You may think so.  I respectfully disagree.

> You chose to live in community, knowing that there was no equitable
> way to allow for every conceivable factor in income distribution,

More accurate would be: I entered community with the expectation that
each household would have made a sensible evaluation of whether they
could actually afford it, and that when we said we intended to finish
off the property ourselves, we meant it.  I can see reasons now that
those expectations were naive.

> yet you continue to write like everyone has his/her hand in your pocket,
> taking what's rightfully yours.

That's not what I said at all.  I said that certain forms of non-egalitarian
funding would, if involuntary, be equivalent to the forced transfer of
wealth from one family to another.  We haven't attempted to resort to such
measures.

I do not, and never did, expect that all households would contribute in
exactly the same manner.  For example, some might have contributed more
money, and others more labor, and we would have had to come up with some
kind of exchange rate between those.  I'm OK with that kind of thing.

> you're in a relationship with your community. It's time you stopped treating
> it as a commodity that has no other meaning, or move out.

If I thought you had much insight into my relationship with my community,
I might be offended by that.  But I think you're just making yourself look
ridiculous by spouting off about things that you don't understand.

If this conversation is going to continue in a vitriolic vein, we should
probably take it off-list.

        Howard A. Landman
        River Rock Commons
        Fort Collins, CO
_______________________________________________
Cohousing-L mailing list
Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org  Unsubscribe  and other info:
http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L