Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Affordability -- House and lot costs

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Martin Tracy writes:

> It's not a commune, since income is not shared.  It's not a cooperative,
> since dwellings are individually owned.  And it's not cohousing, by your
> definition, since not all units are professionally designed and built.  So
> what is it?

We've had this one out before a month or so ago.  It's cohousing (so long
as you want to call it that).  It may not be the most common form, but none
the less it is.  We at N Street consider ourselves Co-housing, and there
are examples in the cohousing book of developments that were not
professionionally built from scratch.

My rough definition of cohousing is something like: 

        A group of less than a hundred mostly contiguous private dwellings      
        which have some common facilities at which residents eat together 
        regularly, and where the residents collectively decide community 
        issues.

Whether the dwellings are new architect-designed single-family homes or 
adjacent caves in a cliff is irrelevant.  The point is private space which 
public commons attached and community decision making.  

Meanwhile, Rob said 

>The difference I see between cohousers and other types of communities 
>is that cohousers hire other people to do their building for them, 

I think this is an unnecessarily exclusionary classification.

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Stuart Staniford-Chen
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu
N Street Cohousing, Davis, CA
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