Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing and THEY as is THEM

[Fred H Olson WB0YQM (fholson]

Chris Biow BIOW [at] CS.UMD.EDU is the author of this message but
due to a listserv problem it was posted by the COHOUSING-L sysop.
Originally sent on Thu, 8 Sep 94 12:04 CDT but I missed it, sorry. Fred

Clearly I need to change the default for my From: line--my name
is Chris Biow.

My apologies if I misundertood that which I was ranting about, but
I don't think I was off target. I will continue any further discussion
of these issues in e-mail, as there is only one aspect that
is applicable to coho. That is that mortgage financing is available,
in more or less the same form as other types of housing. By building
coho, we are taking over many of the responsibilities of the developer
in terms of getting things approved, both by the mortgage banking
industry and local goverment. But that's something we should pursue
with realism and courtesy, never portraying those we have to work
with as some grand, evil conspirators who want to dash our dreams.
Our society is simply too broad for "the status-quo elements of our
society who profit from ..." to be anyone other than the general
population and those whom the general population chooses to represent
them in government and finance. By and large, those people do just
what we want them to do. As Porkypine said when Albert dumped his 
cigar in the punch at the Anti-Pollution Picnic, "We have met the enemy,
and they is us." 

Outside of that, I'll make the point that I'm no crazed Libertarian--
I regard Libertarians as being as naive as the Crunchy Leftists who,
I fear, may ruin cohousing. I've seen too many other Good Ideas 
become overrun by political extremists whose ideas are extrinsic
to the Good Idea itself. But sure enough, I find potential 
contributors to these ideas turned off by the association with 
that political extreme, the  
appeal of the idea being restricted to a tiny sliver of the political
spectrum. Cohousing is orthogonal to the Left-Right, and even the
Communitarian-Libertarian political axes. I worry that the Crunchy
Left will ruin this Great Idea.
 



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