Re: Conflicting Values?
From: Rob Sandelin (floriferousmsn.com)
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 13:32:09 -0700 (PDT)
Prior to acquiring land, loans, construction schedules, etc these kinds of
discussions can fill up your time and emotional space.  Sometimes they
simply are nothing other than discussions since you will not be able to
control diversity, it might become very hard to have much control over
affordability and how much accessibility you build in over whatever is
required will of course impact affordability.  

Look around at your group at the next meeting and then imagine half of them
gone by the time construction is finished. It might not be that drastic a
turn over, but there have been forming groups where the percentage was even
higher.  Once you acquire control of a site, and start learning the costs of
contruction, some of which is controlled by bank finananceers, you will have
people drop out. It is not uncommon for early forming groups to have wildly
unrealistic ideas of what a unit is going to cost, and when reality hits,
those that can't afford it are either looking for subsidizing type programs,
or they are out. 

Sometimes the very people with the strongest opinions about certain things
like affordibility are the first to fall out of the final mix. If you are
going to do some kind of affordability option then you need to understand
that the start up time for many programs can take as long as a year to get
approval, and sometimes longer. So you need to plan ahead for affordibility
money. Who will you partner with? What are their funding source deadlines?
How does that fit your project schedule?  The bank will generally not
support building some small percentage of units with less expensive options
than the whole project, you will need to find supporting money instead. But
even then, sometimes people mislead themselves about what they can do and
it?s a painful awakening for them when the real numbers require downpayments
and monthly mortgages that are beyond their abiities. 

Diversity is not something you can control either, you can't reserve units
legally for people of a certain race. You can choose where and how you
market, but who shows up is who shows up. If your target is left-handed
anacarist lesbians but the only people who show up with the jobs and money
are right handed hetero males, you pretty much will fill your units with
that population. 

And remember, this whole notion of market rate cooperative living is
enormously high risk and experiemental, and this alone will make it hard to
find people will commit their resources to it.  


Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer
The Environmental Science School
http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm
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-----Original Message-----
From: Regan Conley [mailto:reganconley [at] earthlink.net] 
Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2006 6:53 AM
To: Cohousing-L
Subject: [C-L]_ Conflicting Values?

Our little forming group (Urban D.C. Cohousing) is embroiled in a process
conflict about values.  But it's led me to wonder if we have an underlying
difference and whether we might be better served as two groups.  As
neutrally as possible:

Our group all agrees that values A (accessibility), B (affordability) and C
(diversity) are all important.

As part of our process conflict, it's come to our attention that we have
different priorities for these values.  Some believe that A and B are really
fundamental and it's pointless for people to continue working hard on this
project without an assurance that it's somewhere they will be able to live.
Others believe with absolute moral certitude that C must be most important
to us and that we must be prepared to sacrifice other things (including A
and B) in order to achieve C.

[I must note that the diversity we are primarily, though not exclusively,
talking about is racial.  I just don't want people pointing out the obvious
-- that we probably can't have C without A and B -- when in fact we could
have lots of racial diversity without those two things.  Or we could have
lots of A and B, but hypothetically all white.]

Can this group live happily ever after?  How?

In principle it seems that we certainly can, if we get past the process
problems.  But in reality, everyone that lives in built co- housing is well
aware that they sacrificed something important along the way to get there.
The group was really committed to their values, but had to give something up
in order to get nearly everything else.

How did your group deal with this "what's most important?" problem?   
Does it make sense to deal with it sooner (as a hypothetical conflict when
we might really get all three of those things) or later (when people will
have put in time and emotion and then leave the group)?

Regan Conley
Urban D.C. Cohousing
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