Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Is cohousing a consumer product?

[Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

There are some tricky premises buried in this conversation.  One of them is 
that the self-inflicted trial-by-fire of amateurs learning how to develop real 
estate is a critically important bonding experience, sort of like shared combat 
experience in wartime.  There may be some truth to this … but what does it say 
about the future and longevity of any specific cohousing community?

Cornerstone (Cambridge, MA) is now more than two decades built and occupied.  I 
count the “founders” of Cornerstone as those who joined up, pitched in, and 
risked money before ground-breaking in 2000*.  Since then, unit turn-over has 
been low and slow, but steady.

20-some years later, only one third of our units are occupied by founders.  The 
other two-thirds are owned and occupied by people who missed out on the 
hair-raising development experience, and (mostly) on the organizing meetings 
that took place during the construction phase.  Several of our units are 
occupied by recent purchasers who bought in during the depths of pandemic, when 
we all wore masks and had no community meals.  Some of the replacement 
households had already lived in community, or had a gift for the life style.  
Others, maybe not quite so much.

I could detail out what I see as stages in our community evolution, but that’s 
not my point.  My point is that if cohousing has a future, it’s because it 
sustains and offers a durable culture that lives on and evolves, while specific 
households come and go.  Personally, I am very comfortable with imagining a 
Cambridge of Tomorrow that has 20 established cohousing alternatives, but with 
very few surviving founders.  I’d be surprised if *all* these alternatives are 
*equally* elder-focused, or kid-friendly, or vegan, or car- phobic, or 
“sociocratic”, or self-managing, or income-diverse.  In this model, shoppers 
are both welcome and necessary — and variety of product choice is a plus.

------------------
Thanks, RPD
617.460.4549

 * Incidentally, that’s not me.  The DowdsHouse did not move to Cornerstone 
until 2007.

On March 11, 2023 at 2:23:01 PM, Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L (cohousing-l 
[at] cohousing.org) wrote:

Wonderful thread on the ability/inability to find a place in cohousing. It 
brings to mind two experiences and one conclusion:

1. When I went to my first cohousing conference I was surprised at how many 
people were there not to learn how to form a community but how to find one. I 
was only meeting people who were shopping. And they were shopping far and wide.

2. When I much later tried to build a forum for people who were committed to 
and needed a cohousing community in which the units cost $100,000 or less, it 
didn’t work. The major reason was that no cluster of people formed that wanted 
to work on forming a specific community in a specific place. No commitment to a 
solution specific enough to materialize it.

Cohousing communities are created; they aren’t found.  

Your perfect community can’t exist until you are in it.

Sharon
—————
Sharon Villines, Washington DC

We don’t agonize, we organize. — Nancy Pelosi

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