Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Lessons from a Austin Cohousing that disbanded

[Kathryn McCamant (kmccamant]

I think it is important to separate the issues raised from the
overwhelming difficulties of trying to build any real estate projects
during the last 5 years during the housing bust and Great Recession.
Existing communities felt it in some drop in the sales prices and the
difficulty of selling any homes during the most difficult years of
2008-2010, but the projects that were very much in process got hammered,
as did all types of real estate development during those years.

We were the lucky ones with Wolf Creek Lodge (Grass Valley, CA) ....hard
to get people to understand what a success it was to get the project
built. We had a construction loan lined up, the project out to bid and
ready to go the summer of 2008 when everything came to a screeching halt!
What saved the project was that the community members didn't bolt...they
hung in there and even came up with more money to hold the property (which
we had already bought and had a substantial loan on). It took two years to
put the financing back together, but eventually we did and eventually we
got it built. As I tell people, after all of that...the project no longer
made financial sense and was a money loser for us, but the only thing
worse than not making anything on a project you worked on for years, is
not making money and not seeing it built. Wolf Creek Lodge got built, and
is a great community now for decades to come because we had a very
committed group of members with a lot of money on the line and people hung
in there. I think it is one of the only surviving housing projects (not
just cohousing--but all types of housing) that started before the
recession and actually got built. Had it not been cohousing, with a strong
group of committed buyers in place, the project would have gone back to
the bank like all the real estate projects in process did.

Now, communities are working in a very different housing market which is
moving in the up direction and will make current projects much easier,
although I think every cohousing project feels like it took everything
they had to get it done. But I continue to be surprized by the number of
people who think they can do a multi-million real estate deal with out any
experience or paying professionals with that experience. Real estates
deals are risky and there is a reason seasoned real estate developers are
conservative. 

Katie 

-- 
Kathryn McCamant, President, Architect
CoHousing Partners, LLC
241 Commercial Street
Nevada City, CA 95959
T.530.478.1970  C.916.798.4755
www.cohousingpartners.com





On 6/5/14 9:42 AM, "Matt Lawrence" <matt [at] technoronin.com> wrote:

>
>On Thu, 5 Jun 2014, Fred H Olson wrote:
>
>>
>> A lot more people would like to live in cohousing than have
>> managed to do so.  Many projects to build cohousing do not succeed
>> after varying amounts of progress.  It esiser to talk about
>> success so analyses of those that failed are less common but
>> there are lessons to be learned from them.
>>
>> Today I happened onto one (from about 2011?) :
>>
>>> We're sorry to announce that Austin Cohousing has disbanded,
>>> and our Kaleidoscope Village project is not going to happen.
>>
>> For the rest of this 2 page file see:
>> http://www.austincohousing.org/
>>
>> Note that this page may be from one person's point of view, I don't
>>know.
>
>There were a number of other issues that also contributed to the failure.
>This project is also why I finally gave up on Cohousing after researching
>it for over 15 years.
>
>-- Matt
>It's not what I know that counts.
>It's what I can remember in time to use.
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