Cohousing-L Mailing List: healthy market, happy home...

[Tiffany Lee Brown (magdalen23]

kathy - it sounds cool! thanks for letting me know about them. and for 
encouraging me and my ideas.

some of my thoughts arise from having grown up on 80 acres in unincorporated 
Lane County, Oregon, near the town of Eugene. an urban co-housing development 
might have very different needs and opportunities. if i were a co-houser in 
Portland, i could go home for community, family, potlucks, and a garden... then 
rent a studio at ActivSpace for my Etsy business or giving painting lessons, go 
to a friend's ramshackle old Victorian for band practice in the basement, walk 
over to the library, pick up some organic groceries on the way home. when i 
wanted to see a few faces around me, sip coffee, and work on my laptop, i could 
walk a couple blocks to the nearest cafe. that doesn't exist "out in the 
country." it should be possible to bring some of those together. (well, in the 
*new* Portland, people can no longer afford to rent their studios, so perhaps 
urban realities will need to accommodate more entrepreneurship within housing 
communities, too.) 

i love what Katie noted about home-based businesses bringing in new community 
members—because they came in for violin lessons and ended up liking the whole 
place and buying a unit. i come from the arts, music, and literature worlds. we 
tend to cast money-makers and businesspeople as somehow Bad, and our pure lofty 
artistic pursuits as Good. i also come from hippie, punk, old-school 
goth-industrial, and other subcultures, which can be aggressively hostile to 
our corporate, capitalist system. but hey, it is what we have right now. we 
have a place where capital is king and property ownership trumps humanity. my 
forebears in the 1960s might have been quicker to advocate for tearing the 
whole system down. i'm a middle aged Gen X'er with a preschooler. i just want 
to work with what we've got. i also see Millennials living a blended life of 
online-offline, personal brand-community self, entrepreneurship-everyday life. 
in my generation, a few of us did that (freelance writers like me, for 
example), but these guys appear to be stuck with it whether they like it or 
not. many of them profess idealistic views and want to help heal the planet. 
the right community business/arts/eco project could really give them something 
solid to work with in their uncertain lives, and would benefit from their 
enthusiasm and creative idea-making.

in the early -mid 1990s, i was involved with one of the earliest Internet 
community-business crossovers. called Fringe Ware, it was based in Austin, TX 
and eventually spawned a brick-and-mortar bookstore. the founders, Paco X. 
Nathan and Jon Lebkowsky, were older than me. Paco was just a few years older 
than me, but experienced in the nascent digital economy, and recognized that 
the next phase wouldn't just be an "information economy" but an "attention 
economy." Jon came from the politically active Baby Boomer generation. they 
spoke eloquently about the need for making the market a place of positive human 
interaction and progress, not throwing the market out on its ear. the solution 
was to heal the marketplace and do good business, in this view.  

it's hard to make healthy marketplaces in a sick economy that rewards 
environmental destruction via intentional obsolescence of products, with a 
politics that calls corporations "persons" and affords them human rights. but 
in our small ways, perhaps people like me can create at least semi-ethical, 
somewhat decent and compassionate spaces for living, working, and creating. 
that's my dream.


tiffany


On Feb 28, 2016, at 6:28 AM, Kathy Icenogle wrote:

> 
> Tiffany,
> 
> Sounds like your community has a great plan.
> 
> If you ever get to Boulder, you should check out an area in North Boulder
> between Easy Rider Ln, 16th St. and Zamia called Studio Muse. It is a super
> example of Live-Work housing where residences are on the second floor and
> workspaces on first level open onto a walk-way... The workspaces have glass
> garage doors that can be opened during good weather.  Even if you are in a
> semi-rural location, there is something to be said for keeping the
> buildings relatively dense, which would allow more open space and room for
> small agriculture ...
> 
> Kathy
> Washington Village, Boulder
> 
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:53 PM, Tiffany Lee Brown <magdalen23 [at] gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> it's exciting to read everyone's contributions to this discussion. the
>> semi-rural community i hope to help instigate will be explicitly friendly
>> to home-based businesses and creative entrepreneurs; the hope is that our
>> community building would house not only community dinners, meetings, and
>> yoga classes, but art studios and small offices for members to rent, and
>> the occasional well-paying catered event, such as a wedding. i imagine
>> that, or perhaps art/music/writing studios that could be used as offices
>> dotted throughout the land. multiple revenue streams could be embedded from
>> the outset, so that income from wellness, arts, small agriculture, artisan
>> foods, and tourism is baked into the community. (so far, it seems this
>> vision would be hard to mesh with the land-use laws in my home state,
>> Oregon, so it may be this never actually happens or we head for Idaho.)
>> 
>> anyway. thanks again for all the information, stories, and opinions.
>> 
>> -tiffany in oregon
>> wannabe co-houser
>> 
>> 
>> On Feb 24, 2016, at 10:15 AM, Kathryn McCamant wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> I think having people working out of their homes can be a real benefit to
>>> the community, and likely to become increasingly popular as more and more
>>> people work independently.
>>> 
>>> I remember an early study that concluded about 30% of cohousers actually
>>> work full or part time from home.
>>> 
>>> Having more people working from home, and their clients coming and going,
>>> increases your security with more ³eyes on², reduces driving (and climate
>>> impact), and bring positive exposure to the community for future resales.
>>> For example, the lovely family that bought the house next door to me in
>>> Nevada City Cohousing, knew about the community because they brought
>> their
>>> daughter to our common house for violin lessons. Having people working
>>> from home also means they are more likely to be around when the community
>>> needs someone to let in a repair person or other such things during the
>>> day.
>>> 
>>> I would agree with Phillip, and suggest giving it a try, thinking about
>> it
>>> optimistically, and if there are indeed problems that arise, then deal
>>> with them, or retract the option for people with more than a certain
>>> number of visitors for their business. But I¹d hate to see you not even
>>> give it a try before you know if there are really any issues. You might
>> be
>>> surprized how little you even notice those other visitors.
>>> 
>>> Katie
>>> --
>>> Kathryn McCamant, President
>>> CoHousing Solutions
>>> 241B Commercial Street
>>> Nevada City, CA 95959
>>> T.530.478.1970  C.916.798.4755
>>> www.cohousing-solutions.com
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _________________________________________________________________
>>> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
>>> http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> Tiffany Lee Brown
>> editor, plazm magazine
>> tiffany [at] plazm.com / magdalen23 [at] gmail.com
>> 
>> 
>> 
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>> 
>> 
>> 
> _________________________________________________________________
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> 
> 

Tiffany Lee Brown
editor, plazm magazine
tiffany [at] plazm.com / magdalen23 [at] gmail.com