Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: How to start and try cohousing for a young Peruvian family?

[Jerry McIntire (jerry.mcintire]

Bienvenidos Alexis y toda la familia,

What wide open opportunities you have! Do you come from the coast or the
mountains of Peru?

Your situation is not too different from my family's a few years ago. I can
tell you a little about our search. We lived in Portland, Oregon which we
thought was too large and expensive (though it is much less expensive than
NY or Montclair and, it has many cohousing communities). Like Portland,
Denver, Minneapolis, Burlington (Vermont), Seattle, Austin (Texas) and a
few other cities are large, have busy airports and a lower cost of living
than the NY area, and they all have cohousing communities. We looked at
smaller towns though, such as Eugene and Corvallis (Oregon), Ithaca (NY),
Carbondale and Durango (Colorado), Grass Valley and Sacramento (CA),
Sandpoint (Idaho). Their proximity to airports varies. For us, lower real
estate prices and a community where families moved to live (rather than a
resort town) were priorities.

You may notice that none of the towns we considered are in the southern
tier of the country. It's a climate preference for us-- we prefer cold to
hot.

Because of our priorities we chose a small town in SW Wisconsin which is
two hours from a regional airport. You probably want to be closer to an air
hub. Towns I would recommend investigating are Sacramento, Denver, Madison
(Wisconsin), Bloomington (IN), Belfast and Brunswick (Maine), western
Massachusetts (several towns and cohousing communities), Ann Arbor (MI),
Ithaca or Saugerties (NY). In the smaller and western towns you often find
friendly people and a slower pace than metro NYC.

The most important step, I think, is to visit towns and the cohousing
communities. Renting is not always possible, but if you visit you will
learn if rentals are available and if you want to take that step. It is
usually easy to stay at a community for a day or two to meet people, share
a dinner together, and see the houses, etc. We did this many times and we
liked many of the communities we visited, but not every one was for us. We
are happy to be in our rural small town now, and founding a new cohousing
community. I wish you success and happiness in finding a new home and good
friends for your family, wherever you go.

All the best, Jerry
stonesthrowcommunity.wordpress.com