Cohousing-L Mailing List: Fwd: Seeking small cohousing communities (10-14 households) with common area inside main building?

[Wendy Willbanks Wiesner (wwiesner]

Hello All,

Developments of this size are referred to as "incremental", and there are
specific ways of approaching them.

In this same vein, I just attended an Incremental Development Alliance
(IDA) workshop in Seattle last week.  IDA is a national organization that
assists small developers across the country in doing both new construction
and retrofits that are 20 units or less.  (Interestingly enough, the woman
sitting next to me had brought along a copy of the Senior Cohousing
Handbook).

I will be integrating the relevant information/concepts from this workshop
into the day-long intensive I am leading at the conference on May 18,
titled How to Make Housing that People Really Want and that EveryTown Needs.

The most important thing to consider with this 7-12 unit project discussed
below is what in fact can be financed.  The good news is that conventional
mortgage products can be used with projects of this size, assuming that
they pencil out.  Having a tenant during the day in the common space could
be helpful in this respect.

One thing that does catch my attention is the low-end number of 7.  An odd
number of units indicates a possibly less-than-standard building layout
(more expensive).  Possibly the total number of units is 8 with one planned
for use as a common house?  If so, making this a unit that could be easily
converted to a standard unit in the future would lower the risk and thus
encourage a banker to be much more amenable to the project.

Wendy

Wendy Willbanks Wiesner
Executive Director
Partnerships for Affordable Cohousing (PFAC)

On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 12:31 PM, Diana Christian <diana [at] ic.org> wrote:

>
> Hello,
>     I’m hoping to help the founders of a small, 7-12 household forming
> cohousing community, in Flat Rock, NC to be called Highland Lake Cove
> Cohousing.
>
>      They’re seeking examples of small cohousing communities with the
> common-house area inside the building that contains the housing units —
> like an apartment building — rather than the common house being in a
> separate building.
>    They’d like to get a sense of how groups design such relatively
> smaller, in-the-building common areas for their forming community.
>    If any Coho-L browsers can point me to cohousing communities that might
> be this small and built like this, please let me know!
>
>     Several of these founders, and several from Westwood Cohousing in
> Asheville, NC, attended a 3-day Sociocracy workshop in Asheville, NC last
> weekend. And both groups had half-day overview workshops recently too.
> (It’s also called Dynamic Governance.)
>         Friends in each group, Highland Lake Cove and Westwood, just
> emailed saying they will create an in-house study group/training group to
> begin teaching  basic parts of Sociocracy to their larger groups, and
> they’ll implement those parts into their meetings. And they intend after
> many months of demonstration and practice to propose to their respective
> communities that they try using Sociocracy for 18 months to 2 years.
> (Groups usually just try Sociocracy for 18-24 months to see if they like
> using it, and if they do, they keep it.)
>     Sociocracy trainer Jerry Koch-Gonzalez and I are teaching an overview
> introduction to Sociocracy as pre-conference intensive (day-long workshop)
> at the Coho/US Cohosuing Conference in Nashville, on Friday May 19. People
> can attend the workshop even if they don’t attend the conference itself.
> Here’s the registration page:
> http://www.cohousing.org/2017/intensives/Sociocracy
>
>     Diana
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>