Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: New York Times article on the Rocky Corner foreclosure

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Feb 11, 2022, at 6:05 PM, Ann Zabaldo <zabaldo [at] earthlink.net> wrote:

> What I would like to do is not Monday-morning quarter back this event. It’s 
> waaaay too complex.  Instead, I stand quietly w/ the members of this great 
> community of people.  They were … and are ... warriors.  They took on a big 
> vision. And they didn’t falter. In the face of mounting pressure to complete 
> their vision … in the vulnerability of acceptance of their fading dream … 
> talking to a reporter about their loss … they didn’t falter.  

What happened to Rocky Corner could happen to any project and the list of 
reminders that Tom gave are all the things Rocky Corner most likely did, some 
of them twice since they first tried to build in New Haven. I tried to find the 
industry failure rate in real estate development but the figures get mixed up 
with sales — 95% of new agents fail. 

Major developers go broke all the time from failed projects even with 
experience—for some, like Donald Trump, its a business model. The fact that he 
gets away with it has to say something about how frequent it is. 

I visited this project a few years ago and walked the land before they had 
started building, though they knew where things would go. I thought they had 
done some very creative things to ensure subsidized housing units and in 
working with a professional real estate financial advisor, who then himself 
invested in the project.

It’s hard when it's your own project to be realistic about this. It seems 
absurd that a cohousing project, in particular, should be foreclosed. One of  
our first members truly believed that we were a qualified 501c3 charity 
organization. So noble and righteous we were. "Contributions should be 
deductible and we should solicit grants.”

It still hurts hundreds of miles away.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org