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

[Charles Nuckolls (administrator]

My impression, as a cultural anthropologist, is that as the economy has 
withered and the middle class stagnated, lots of American have decided to 
return to the old-style religion:  the belief that cooperative endeavors 
destroy individual initiative and pave the way to government control.  The 
reactionary turn in American politics over the last ten years is breathtaking.  
And scary.  The increasingly dominant Tea Party discourse -- as ridiculous as 
it may seem to many of us -- has made a sane conversation about slowing growth 
in an age of increasing resource limits very hard to sustain.  For those of us 
still trying to build cooperative communities, the job is not getting any 
easier -- quite the reverse.  I take some comfort from that fact that I can 
still spend three months of the year in a fishing village on the southeastern 
coast of India, a place where excessive individualism (known in the local 
language as 'ahankaramu') is still considered a
 form of mental illness.

Charles Nuckolls, Ph.D.
Last Surviving Member
Utah Valley Commons
www.utahvalleycommons.com




________________________________
 From: R Philip Dowds <rpdowds [at] comcast.net>
To: Cohousing-L Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> 
Sent: Thursday, June 5, 2014 9:38 AM
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Lessons from a Austin Cohousing that disbanded
 


The story at the link seems familiar and credible.

DELAY:  All experienced with real estate development — whether developers, 
planning board members, or anti-development activists — know that delay is 
usually a project’s worst enemy.  An experienced development team can smell it 
coming, and will have learned coping strategies, but novices often get 
blindsided and find themselves trudging through quicksand they did not even 
know was there.

THE GREAT RECESSION:  This financial calamity croaked many, many innocent 
households, groups, institutions, and other decent parties who did not deserve 
it.  Austin went down, but sadly, Austin was far from alone.  The enduring 
disgrace is not that of getting clobbered by the disaster, but rather, that of 
a nation which has been unable to identify and prosecute the villains, or even 
learn its lesson.

RPD

On Jun 5, 2014, at 11:18 AM, Fred H Olson <fholson [at] cohousing.org> 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.
> 
> Fred
> 
> --
> Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
>     Email:        fholson at cohousing.org      612-588-9532
> My Link Pg: http://fholson.cohousing.org         My org:
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> 
> 

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