Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: affordability--funding

[School of Mathematics, U of MN (dept]

On Mon, 8 Aug 94 08:04 CDT, 
Grace Von Tobel (gkvontob [at] colby.edu)  <cohousing-l [at] uci.com> wrote:

>We have been committed to a 2 to 1 ratio of low-income to mid & up-income
>MIXED-inome community.  Lenders have done eveything under the sun to divide
>us and put the po' folk into a ghetto.  Our solution has been a bizarre
>collection of legal entities (1 low-income co-op that will receive FmHA 1%
>mortgages and other assorted affordability assists. 
>
and further down....
 
The fact that
>bankers, FmHA, etc. have never heard of such nor have a clue about
>consensus decision-making and other cooperative procedures is the very
>reason that CoHousers need to persevere.  Pioneering work ain't easy, but
>it is essential.  The tribal view of caring for the grandchildren of one's
>own grandchildren is the mind-set I hope we CoHousers bring to our own but
>also to the awareness of the culture around us.
>

I would love to hear more about your (or anybody else's) experience with 
FNMA and mortgage bankers with regard to consensus.  Yesterday we had a 
rather painful meeting at which the question was posed whether we should 
try to get consensus written into the legal papers which will go to FNMA 
and mortgage bankers.  The decision was that we would explore whether 
consensus would be acceptable to FNMA (we had never asked anybody there 
outright) and if the answer is negative, we would go with a voting 
structure.  From what I understand about FNMA, regional offices make their 
own decisions and have their own interpretations.  

There is a number of us who have very strong feelings about having 
consensus written into our legal structure.  All of us would prefer if it 
were so.  We're also very concerned how our legal structure will affect 
what will happen when somebody sell his/her unit and we could be faced with 
the situation that we have no control over who moves in.

Monika Stumpf, Monterey CoHousing-Mpls, dept [at] math.umn.edu