Cohousing-L Mailing List: Role of professionals

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

I changed the name of this thread to be more align with the topic

 Roger Diggle  Said

>In the meantime, I still want my cohousing community, and I can't afford to
>(nor am I prepared to) stand back and let the professionals do it for me.  I
>just don't see any way that I'm going to escape doing both things - building
>and making community - at the same time...


What I see as a vision for the future is that professional 
organizations would deal with purchasing the land and take care of the 
land development issues.  Getting an option on a site is the biggest 
turning point which separates cohousing reality from fantasy.  There 
are several things groups have learned about design, group process, 
etc. which could be applied to expedite the Cohousing process.  Here is 
the scenario:  that while a group is being formed, a professional group 
is searching for suitable sites.  The group forms, with experienced 
guidance,  establishes decision making, conflict resolving and 
communication processes, sets up its goals and values and community 
building processes, and then, after all that is done (6-9 months) they 
are contacted by the professional organization with 3-4 site choices.

The group picks a site, the professional folks take care of the option 
process, permit process, rezone application etc. while the group 
focuses on site and housing design.  After 6 months the group has a 
site design, all the permits are lined up and contractors start building.

Cohousing from first meeting to building in 12-14 months.  The key part 
of it, designing the site is done by the residents with professional 
help. All the site acquisition, and permit  stuff is done by a separate 
professional organization, in parallel with group formation and design work.

What happens now is that groups do all this formation work, then look 
for a site.  They don't have a clue how to do this and often lose 
members because it seems impossible to do, and little progress happens. 
 I have watched 3 cohousing groups form, then die because they couldn't 
find a site, and didn't hire any kind of professional for this.  From 
what I heard at the Conference this seems to be a wide spread phenomena.

There are too many tedious, labor intensive details in doing land 
development which are best suited, and left to professionals.  Let the 
group members focus their time and energies on designing the space and 
doing community building things and not on all the complexities of 
rezoning, buying land, creating legal forms etc.  For groups to spend 
three months of meetings on legal process is stupid- these are known 
things at this point and a waste of group time. Let that stuff go to 
professionals  and put energies into creating community and designing 
your spaces and the process will go very much faster.  If every 
cohousing group reinvents the same wheels, over and over again, I do 
not believe that cohousing will expand to its potential as a viable, 
widespread housing option.  The pool of people who will sacrifice three 
years or more of time to becoming land developers is not that great.  
The pool of people who want and would buy into a better designed 
community is very large.  We just need to reduce the entrance requirements.

Rob Sandelin
Puget Sound Cohousing Network