Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Membership sale agreement questions

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Oh yeah, another thing I forgot to mention about our condo - co-op 
legal concept in my previous posting - We could have created the entire 
property as the condominium, not just the housing areas, and had the 
greenbelt as a common area within the condominium.  The reason we 
maintained the greenbelt as a separate cooperative corporation was two fold:
1. To keep control of the property out of the hands of banks.  The 
banks can forclose on the condominium if we ever want to take out a 
group loan and we didn't ever want to risk losing our woods.
2. We intend to pass title to the greenbelt to a conservancy agency 
land trust so the land will remain in its natural state in perpetuity 
and also reduce our taxes on it.  The current value of our greenbelt, 
which has development potential, is about $2 million dollars.  Our goal 
is that these woods remain natural and undeveloped forever. In order to 
do that we need to take ownership out of the hands of the people who 
could profit from its sale, the current co-op share holders.  We all 
agree now that we don't want to develop this land, but 50 years from 
now the property owners may feel differently, not to mention the value 
of the land will be much greater.  We want to take this land out of any 
potential development market forever. To do this we will transfer the 
title to the land to a group land trust, with binding convenants.  The 
group land trust is made of 4-8 other land owning cooperatives and the 
board of this land trust is made up of 1 member from each cooperative.  
In order to sell the land, 100% of the Sharingwood cooperative share 
holders would have to agree and 100% of the land trust board members 
would have to also agree, something which is possible, but very unlikely.