Cohousing-L Mailing List: [no subject]

[John Jainschigg (johnj]

Subject: Cyberspace community vs. Face-to-face community 
 
Here I sit, with my heart on Cantine s Island in Saugerties, New York and
my butt on a chair in front of my computer in a New York City apartment,
preparing my first foray into the online CoHo conference.  Vicariously --
as I m not plugged in, I m going to have to download this to my group
member John Jainschigg to enter for me.  Everywhere I look lately I m
surrounded by cyberspace -- Newsweek and Utne Reader both devoted to it
this week, my husband studying MacWorld when he s not deep in his own
computer doing Site/Building Committee work for Cantine s Island, me
spending 20-30 hpw coordinating Outreach and Membership Services for same. 
Now and then we get up and go to our  meat  jobs (as nurses).  Every second
weekend we drive up to Saugerties, actually seeing, even occasionally
touching, the people who we hope will some(realtime)day be our actual (not
virtual) neighbors. 
 
I so regret that I couldn t come to the Gathering in Boulder this past
Fall.  It came at the end of a 5-week (for me, unpaid) vacation trip, and
we just couldn t justify the $800 or more that it would have cost.  But on
that Friday when the Burning Souls were meeting, there was truly nowhere
else on earth that I belonged.  I was hitting a slump in my Outreach work
just then, and could have used the infusion of energy and vision. 
 
It has been so hard for us to get and keep Full Members.  We need 12,
currently have 7 (3 have resigned over the past several months).  Of our 9
Participating Member households, I estimate that we ll be lucky if 1 or 2
actually come through to become Full Members and residents in the
community.  Most of our development work is done; very soon we re going to
come to the place where we have to go to construction, or give it up and
sell the land to pay off our development debts.  We ve talked about the
possibility of just going ahead and building our 7 houses, foregoing the
CommonHouse for now, and continuing Outreach in situ.  The problem is that
we d really have to do the whole infrastructure and the cost would be
prohibitive, divided among fewer than 12 households.   
 
I wonder all the time why we re having so much trouble getting members, and
why other groups don t seem to have this problem.  This is what I think: 
 
First of all, there are so few people in the general population who will
self-select for CoHousing.  Many of the people who are financially
successful enough to pay the apparently unavoidable high price for a house
in a CoHo community have personality traits or philosophies which cause
them to rule out CoHousing.  Many of the people who desire the CoHousing
way of life are not financially viable enough.  Of those who are, many are
shut out by some of the other features of a CoHo development:  too many
meetings, too much risk, bad timing, long-delayed gratification, changes in
finances or personal life during the waiting period, etc. etc.   
 
At Cantine s Island, we have in addition a number of factors peculiar to
our situation:  we re in New York State (choked with taxes and legal
regulations), in Ulster County (marginal economy shocked by IBM closing in
Kingston), and in Saugerties (admittedly not the most attractive town).  We
re too far from NYC for commuting.  Albany is only 40 miles away, but we ve
had trouble breaking the ice on Outreach there (we re now investigating
hiring a PR professional to target that area).  We ve lost a lot of people
because they couldn t see how to establish an income locally.  Many of the
people who already live in the area are accustomed to having a lot of
spacial and visual privacy, something they re not willing to trade for the
closeness of Cohousing.  Some people have said that 12 households is too
small for them. 
 
Some of the most pleasing or interesting aspects of our property are
inherently hazardous: a quarter-mile of frontage on a deepwater creek, a
bluestone cliff that runs through the property, easement rights to the
creek bank up to the dam, and the ruins of old mill buildings buried in the
woods on the next property.  A lot of families with young children haven t
been willing to accept these risks.  Not to mention that we ll have to go
to quite a lot of trouble to mitigate them.   
 
I should put in a positive word here:  the place is wondrous, having an air
of seclusion while being essentially in the middle of town.  We see herons
and ospreys, and many other birds.  There s a large, longstanding organic
garden and extensive flower beds.  A sturdy and commodious old brick
building stands ready to shelter storage, workshops, protected gardening,
performance space, etc.  The folks in our group (needless to say) are the
best the world has to offer.  The town welcomes us.  What a pleasant,
pretty, warm, lively, supportive, economical, and environmentally sane
place our little neighborhood is going to be! 
 
So to get to my point.  It seems to me that by engaging in this CoHousing
effort at this time, we are putting ourselves in direct opposition to a
torrential mainstream current.  For every article I see touting the virtues
of face-to-face community (NB: written by people sitting alone at
computers), I see dozens of articles which are (directly or indirectly)
about virtual community.  CoHousing is SO HARD TO DO!  Why would anybody in
their right mind ever consign themselves to such a long, hard, risky
effort, which has as its payoff the opportunity to spend the rest of your
life negotiating every damn thing with too many people, on trust that they
really mean it about respecting your privacy and autonomy (yeah, right!)? 
By definition, Peter and I must not be in our right minds, because we ve
hung in here for over 4 years now.  But I m starting to envy the people
whose  community  is literally right at their fingertips, and suspect that
many of our best candidates are already too enmeshed netwise to even
consider going to the effort of building an actual community. 
 
Have any of you online folks, or the non-cybernetic entities in your
CoHousing groups,  been confronting this issue?  I d be happy to receive
any response, especially ones which might be helpful for our Outreach. 
Also -- anyone out there listening in mid-New York State who might be
interested in joining us?  Call our Contact person at 914-255-8601 (sorry,
no e-mail address). 
 
Susan Murphy, Cantine s Island CoHousing 
c/o johnj [at] pipeline.com