Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cantine's Island having trouble attracting new members

[Bob Morrison (morrison]

On Wed, 15 Mar 1995 21:48:24, Susan Murphy (using account of)
 John Jainschigg <johnj [at] pipeline.com> wrote:

> Subject: Cyberspace community vs. Face-to-face community 
 
> 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
>are 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.  

  There hasn't been much discussion about this in the ten days since it was
posted, but I have some thoughts.
  I agree that all of the above things would discourage people from moving to
a cohousing community, and I wish you luck in getting enough people to make
this project fly.
  I have two suggestions. One is to promote this as a place for telecommuters
to live. It is close enough to Albany and NYC that people could commute to
jobs in these places one day a week and telecommute the other four days. It's
not really necessary to install fancy wiring and hardware to accommodate tele-
commuters. All people really need is a secong (or third) phone line.
  The other suggestion is to promote it as a place for retirees to live. 
Specifically, retirees who have family in the NYC metro area and would like to
be within day-trip distance of the city but well outside the city. And even
a site that is not the most attractive spot on the Hudson would probably look
a lot better to these people than what is available in the same price range in
the NYC metro area.

>A sturdy and commodious old brick
>building stands ready to shelter storage, workshops, protected gardening,
>performance space, etc.

  This sounds like a great fringe benefit.

>CoHousing is SO HARD TO DO!  Why would anybody in
>their right mind ever consign themselves to such a long, hard, risky
>effort...

  I am beginning to wonder this myself. And the idea of creating community
without doing new construction has become more appealing to me, as it has to 
several others on the list. 

Bob Morrison

Home: Boxboro, MA               Work: Digital Equipment Corp., Littleton, MA