Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: More-equal Housing

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Cris Biow said:
>Rob Sandelin followed up:

>>One way to select membership from a particular set of humanity is to
>>advertise in ways which will attract the set you are looking for.  For
>>example, if you are looking for families with kids, then advertise in
>>parenting magazines and such.  Our local baby diaper service has a
>>newspaper on parenting which accepts advertising.

>Rob, I know you didn't really mean what you said.

I did mean what I said. If you want specific sets of humanity, whether 
they be parents, elderly, religous, or ethnic, how and where you 
adverstise will determine who calls.  It is NOT unreasonable to desire 
a mixture of people and I have seen diversity listed as a goal of many 
cohousing groups.  Most other types of intentional communities have 
very strict reviews about who becomes members and have very specific 
criteria that prospective members must adhere by (in my experience this 
seems to be true more of religous communities than others).  For 
example, a local religous commune requires members to have had a 
certain religous experience before they can join as members.

If a group decides it really  wants <ethnic or other type of humanity 
here> then it will advertise in places where <ethnic or other type of 
humanity here> will find out about it. In the Seattle area there is a 
group of mennonites who are forming their own cohousing sort of living 
arrangement. Non-mennonites are not invited.   In any metropolitan area 
there is an organization of just about every type of set of humanity 
you can think of .  Advertising to those organizations is a legimate 
way to reach that subset of humanity.  For example, there was a nice 
article on Cohousing in a recent issue of Mothering magazine.  The 
demographics of the readship of that magazine I would suspect are 
pretty limited to women.  The demographics of field and stream or Road 
and Track I would suspect are mostly men.  The demographics of Ebony 
are mostly African American and the demographics of Teen are mostly 
people under 20.  Now, if you wanted to get an advertisement out to 
African American mothers, field and stream would be a poor choice, 
Ebony and Mothering would be better choices. There are specialized 
demographics newsletters and magazines by the thousands.

Diversity of race is something which Cohousing groups often wish for 
and do not find.  One way of acheving this is to target advertising to 
those you want to attract.  There are actually advertising agencies 
which have specialists in how to work with target markets, such as the 
elderly, etc.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood