Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Affordability?

[Becky Weaver (beckyweaver]

--- April <aroggio [at] nycap.rr.com> wrote:

> Are there any cohousing communities that are really
> affordable?  Not cohousing communities that have
> some sort of small "affordable" subsidized housing,
> but genuinely created by those of us that are middle
> income? 

Hi April,

Check out Kaleidoscope Village in Austin, Texas. We
are fortunate to be working with a development team
that includes a project manager experienced in
creating affordable, green housing. Our prices are
shaping up to be quite reasonable for the local
market. We also are working with a non-profit
organization to assist households, on an individual
basis, that need help crossing a barrier to
homeownership.  

Whatever your community's goals, it is important to
keep in mind that you cannot be all things to all
people. For the KV community, deciding to meet certain
very specific affordability goals has meant that many
other priorities have had to take second (or third, or
fourth) place. This has lost us some valuable
community members - not because they left in a huff,
but because in sticking with our goal of affordable
homes, we could not meet other needs that were very
important to those individuals. 

If you have plenty of land, and members with widely
varying housing priorities, it may be best to choose
the "lot development" model (for example RoseWind, or
the plans at Caer Coburn) and have each family
responsible for getting their own house built. I am
not sure this is the best way to get the best price on
decent housing for everybody, but it does allow
families to set their own priorities and have control
over the decisions about their own homes. 

I think that if you want to build affordable
cohousing, it's important to define very clearly what
"affordable" means to your group.  I recommend that
you not decide that "affordable" means "your current
members can afford it." That is a moving target, and
you will spend many uncomfortable hours trying to
decide whether, and how, a particular solution meets
that goal. Find something concrete ("25% of homes
affordable to households earning 80% of the median
income" for example, which allows for changes in the
economy over a multi-year development project). Make
sure that goal is achievable considering the cost of
housing in your region, and that the majority of your
members can live with the type of homes these prices
are going to create. 

You may find that there are irreconcilable differences
within your community about cost vs. other priorities
(location is a big one, also construction techniques).
Better to find that out early, then find it out when
your group has painfully battered itself against
reality for several years. 

You may very well have members walk away from the
prosepct of "lowest-common-denominator" housing. If
you prioritize affordability, you will not be able to
locate in the most fabulous neighborhood. You will
probably not get cutting-edge design in beautiful,
all-natural, hand-crafted healthy-home materials. And,
even so, you will price some famlies out. If you have
clear, realistic affordability goals at the beginning
of your project, you'll have to do a lot less
soul-searching when some great potential community
members either cannot afford or cannot accept aspects
of your project. 

Kaleidoscope Village was fortunate in that the City of
Austin has a program, S.M.A.R.T. Housing, that
provides benefits to developers for creating housing
that is Safe, Mixed-Income, Accessible,
Reasonably-priced, and Transit-oriented. These are all
values our community could really get on board with;
so we decided that our goal was to qualify for SMART
Housing status. 

This program thus set our minimum standards for green
building, affordability, handicapped-accessibility,
and location. That, in turn, took a lot of either-or
type decisions out of the group's hands, which
considering the infinite number of possible options
and trade-offs, was a great thing. We took a shortcut
to setting concrete goals; and in return we get
concrete benefits. The program prevented us from
killing ourselves trying to be all things to all
people.

Also, please keep in mind that many (most?) cohousing
developments are in areas where housing is very
expensive. Almost any house in California with
electricity and indoor plumbing is going to cost at
least $400,000. That doesn't mean that a similar
cohousing unit would cost that much in Tulsa,
Oklahoma. The best way to see what you might get for
what kind of price premium (or lack thereof) is to
compare cohousing prices with other housing in the
same city. 

Good luck!

Becky Weaver
Kaleidoscope Village, Austin, Texas
(Currently residing in Belfast, Maine)


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remake him.
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