Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Housing enmasse/kibbutz/hello from Sacramento

[David L. Mandel (75407.2361]

Hello fellow and aspiring cohousers, I believe I'm the first one on this line 
here from Southside Park Cohousing in Sacramento. I started listening in about
two weeks ago and am already a week behind, but tonight I got the itch to 
delve into at least one topic. First, in brief: we must be weird, but I don't 
think we have any Unitarians,... well, maybe one. A lot more liberal Catholics
here, it seems, and while we all talk an ecumenical line, a lot of them still 
don't get why I, an atheist Jew, don't like having a tree in the common house 
in December. But we manage that. 

As for polyamory (is that the noun?) I'd bet that a lot of us were once, but 
as far as I can tell, we're all too busy attending committee meetings and 
trying to keep our established relationships right side up to give it much 
attention. But then again, maybe I'm being left out, too. 

And I have to say something brief about freeway noise: We have Interstate 5  
two blocks west and Business 80 three blocks south, plus their intersection in
the middle. When we were trying to name our community a few years back, one 
popular nomination was "Dos Freeways." But now, I swear, we all agree it 
sounds like the ocean.

And now for the main item that got me going here (Apologies if I'm ignoring 
other comments on the subject in the last few days that I haven't read yet, 
but it's already 1:30 a.m. and I'm not going to get to them at least until 
tomorrow):  

On Feb 1, 1995, Blake Cullimore, assigned as a student (did I understand that 
right?) to design a housing development of 170 units on 25 acres, queried as 
to whether a sense of community could be developed in such circumstances. 
'Could this be cohousing?' I read him asking, between the lines. And shortly 
thereafter, someone else (oops, I'm not sure how to look back for the name 
without killing this message) responded:
>Hmm.  I don't think that something that large could be "cohousing" 
>community in the sense of a small group of households defining and 
>operating it cooperatively.  It could be a real nice small town to live 
>in though, the sort of natural neighborly small town (bigger than a 
>village) that we hope cohousing is a deliberate recreation of.  But it 
>couldn't be cohousing in the details of, oh, 100's to dinner and forums 
>and meetings.  And the grounds meeting over trying deal with and 
>ameliorate the terrible site would probably tear it up anyway.

>Gee.  I guess that means No.

Well, I wouldn't be so pessimistic. First of all, as for space, that works out
to about 7 units per acre, and speaking from our most urban and dense of 
cohousing communities, we have 25 units on 1.3 acres and have a respectable 
amount of open space, considering. So with rational clustering, there would be
plenty of room for gardens and play areas.

Next, while a community of 170 households would be a very different animal, I 
can say from experience on a number of kibbutzim that it can be a very warm 
and positive community indeed. I spend a year on one of just about exactly 
that size once upon a time, and even though I was a non-member outsider and 17
years old to boot, after a year I was at least acquainted with everyone and 
definitely had a feeling of belonging to a place and a group of people. No, 
there weren't teams of three that cooked dinners five times a week, but yes, 
there was a central kitchen and dining hall in which most people ate most 
meals (that's 3x a day) and which was very similarly to our common house the 
social hub of the community. It would take a different form of organization 
but I see no reason it couldn't be done here.

The big difference on the kibbutz, of course, was that it was not only the 
home of some 200 adults but the employer of 90 percent of them, and also far 
more communal than any of us are in terms of private property ownership. But 
interestingly, that is changing today, to digress to another, related topic: 
I visited Israel in 1992 after being away for 7+ years (I had lived there 
about 11 of the previous 16 years and found that many kibbutzim are quite 
quickly evolving more and more into something like cohousing -- more and more 
members working on the outside, salaries paid to those who work inside, rent, 
of sorts, or more accurately something like a co-op fee, fee for services 
including meals, in some cases fewer meals. I found it fascinating as a former
kibbutz dweller and current (that's 1992, just before we started 
construction), and also quite distressing in the sense that it reflected the 
failure of the kibbutz dream of creating socialism by utopian example. But I 
knew that was unrealistic and at least one can aspire to a more fulfilling 
community of neighbors within capitalism... and maybe that will just turn out 
to be even more subversive than the isolated utopias of before.

Anyone else been at a kibbutz even more recently, or better yet, anyone 
following this polylogue from one now?