Sympathy | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
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.
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