Cohousing-L Mailing List: Introducing David Bogartz

[David Bogartz (bogartz]

Hi, I'm David Bogartz.  I'm 28 years old.  I work as a software engineer at
Ziff Desktop Information.  I live in Boston and work just across the river
in East Cambridge, near the Lechmere T station.  (I love my commute!)

My present home is at Beacon Hill Friends House.  It's a community of about
twenty people living in the historic Beacon Hill neighborhood just off the
Boston Common.  The house is owned by a Quaker corporation and its charter
is to provide a place for students in the Boston area to live and study,
and to provide space for Quaker activities in the greater Boston area
("Salem Quarter").  The house is also presently the location of Beacon Hill
Friends Meeting, a small, lively Quaker Meeting.  The relationship between
the house and the meeting is rich, and has varied a lot over the years. 
I'm both a member of the meeting and a resident at the house, which gives
me two very interesting communities right in my home.

I've been interested in cooperative living for about three years, which is
about how long I've been living in cooperative houses.  By cooperative I
mean sharing space, food, cooking, chores, and other responsibilities, as
well as having friendly, caring relationships with housemates.  I should
add that Beacon Hill Friends House isn't a co-op in one of the most
important senses: it's run by a board, not by the residents, and there are
a lot of decisions that are out of the residents' hands.

I don't know hardly anything about co-housing.  But I'm probably going to
be settling down into some kind of permanent living situation in a couple
of years, after having moved once a year for the past seven years.  So I'm
looking into alternatives to buying a house, condo or apartment on my own.

My preference is an urban setting.  I like being in the city, taking public
transportation, and all the various cultural stuff you can find so easily
in a place like Boston.  I expect I'll want to be living in a city for at
least the next five to ten years.  I might move out of Boston in response
to a job offer, but I doubt it, mainly because there's a lot of
opportunities to do what I do in this area.

I learned about COHOUSING-L from QUAKER-L, which is exactly what it sounds
like.  I check my e-mail daily (continuously?) using Eudora on a Macintosh.

I expect I'll be more of a lurker on this list at first, because I'm mainly
here to learn.  But I'm open to surprises...
--
David Bogartz, Ziff Desktop Information, 25 First St, Cambridge MA 02141
Internet: bogartz [at] zdi.ziff.com     CompuServe/ZiffNet: 72241,1025
   Voice: (617) 252-5280                          Fax: (617) 252-5403