Cohousing-L Mailing List: Bootstrapping a community: alternatives to building?

[Jonathan Kallay (yoni]

Some of you may know that I'm trying to form a new community on Seattle's 
Eastside. I'm also generally interested in exploring ways to increase the 
scalability of cohousing. The fact that forming new communities seems to 
require amateurs to get into the real-estate development business seems to be a 
serious obstacle, so I'd like to know if anyone has any experience with, 
knowledge of, or thoughts about cohousing communities that don't build their 
own facilities. In particular, as mixed-use buildings become more common, it 
seems reasonable to bootstrap a community in one by occupying its residential 
units and part of its commercial space for the common house. For the sake of 
argument, let's suppose that all of the residential units are leased as a block 
from the pre-existing property management and re-let to the members, with dues 
for the common house added on top.


In asking the question, I'd prefer to side-step the question of whether this 
fits into a definition of cohousing (the fact that there might be a third party 
owning and managing the facilities would disqualify it according to Ty 
Albright's rubric, but that's a semantic challenge rather than a logistical 
one).


Jonathan