Sympathy
From: Michael Barrett (mbarretttoast.net)
Date: Tue, 6 May 2008 18:43:44 -0700 (PDT)
Ana,
I'm dismayed and saddened to read your news that you have to abandon your dream 
of creating Footpath Cohousing.

It resonated with me, remembering a comment from the Fire Marshall in Frederick 
County Maryland.  The walkway/roadways/pedways at Liberty Village Cohousing 
were built (in about 1999) to 8 foot width. The Fire Marshall's comment, made 
in perhaps 2003, was that the community could not have been built (in 2003) 
with 8 ft pedways, that 20 feet would have been required.
It seems that "progress" has raised that number to 40 feet (in Durham County 
and probably elsewhere) - which is appalling and almost unbeliveable and - as 
you so rightly point out - would completely destroy any of the desired 
neighborliness you want to create.    

Michael Barrett
Shadowlake Village, Blacksburg, VA.  - where the robins are stealing all the 
earthworms for their chicks, the ponds are full of tadpoles, and we are hoping 
for no last killer frosts up here at 2040 feet on the edge of the Appalachians. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ana M. Sweet said (in part) 

If this were the only problem, we'd work with it. But then a second very large 
issue presented itself: roads.  Less than two years ago, Durham enacted 
requirements that every new house built in Durham County must have a full-blown 
asphalt road, forty feet wide (!) in front of it. This is in order to prevent 
land-locked houses. (We didn't know about this when we started.) 

Clearly, this is not the cohousing model, which strives to minimize paved 
surfaces and separate pedestrian and auto traffic. Current estimates put the 
road cost as per Durham requirements somewhere above $1.2 million. And since 
asphalt is a petroleum-based product, its cost is increasing every day. So we 
were facing an unpredictable and ridiculously high cost to build tons of highly 
expensive road in a community that prefers to have little to none.

Our experienced and trusted team of civil engineers, architects, lawyers, and 
builder each felt that the road situation would be very difficult to overcome. 
However, if the huge, expensive road were the only problem, we would have tried 
very hard to work with it somehow.
  • (no other messages in thread)

Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.