Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Policy Committee & Condo law and Cohousing?

[Fred-List manager (fholson]

Henning Mortensen <hmortensen [at] gmail.com>
is the author of the message below.  It was posted by
Fred, the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org>
after deleting 5 quoted message in the long thread.

Even NON Digest subscribers, please delete most of quoted material.

--------------------  FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS --------------------

In our jurisdiction, there is a condo corporation act and
specifications which cover basic HOA structure and bylaws.

We did not change things to make them cohousing. We change how our
cohousing functions during the required annual general meeting. By
making sure that all decisions are made prior to the agm, the agm is
just a rubber stamping of decisions made under cohousing.

No need to explain cohousing, you do that in how you live the rest of
the year.

The HOA bylaws use voting and can lead to tyranny by the masses, which
is why no decisions are made during our agm.  The agm is about
documenting decisions made prior using our consensus process. We would
only rely on the HOA bylaws if our consensus process had completely
failed.

The main benefit of doing this is:
- reduces lawyer fees in creating HOA bylaws

- as our jurisdiction changes the act and regulations, the changes are
automatically included in our bylaws. We just need to review changes
and perhaps make a new amendment if necessary

- our members know that they have all the protections which our condo
act provides.

We had spent a lot of money in developing our development corporation
bylaws only to find that we never looked at them. It was under our
development corporation that we first began our role-play agm’s.

We found that our condo corporation act allowed us to make a motion at
the agm to change to another decision process, therefore our first
motion is always that we change to deciding by consensus. This
doesn’t change much as all motions were previously arrived at
through consensus.

Hope that clarifies.
Henning Mortensen

Please note, I am not a lawyer and  your jurisdiction may be
different. This is just an idea to consider.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 17, 2019, at 10:51 AM, Alicia Nowicki <alicianowicki [at] gmail.com> 
> wrote:
>
> Henning,
> Could you explain a little about what you mean as vanilla HOA
>structure?  Are you talking about standard HOA bylaws?r  Or what
>exactly do you mean by vanilla HOA structure?  If one were to use
>standard HOA structure there still need to be some changes that
>explain the concept of CoHousing.  Can you help me understand more
>fully what you mean and how you have done this vanilla structure you
>speak of?

> Curious and longing for more understanding,