Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Lot Development Model

[Rob Sandelin (robsan]

Stuart you asked:

>I'm also curious how the process of custom home building will interact
>with group formation.  Custom home building is famously stressful - the
>advice I have heard for couples is not to attempt it unless you are
>certain your relationship is rock solid.  Can people involved in this also
>invest a lot of time in the group process needed to start a community?
>How will the community be different as a result of the different process
>at the start?  (I'm not stating a position, just wondering).

My experience from Sharingwood is that you can't do much community 
stuff as your house is being built, and thus, we have pretty small 
involvement expectations while folks are building their house.  Usually 
the process is that people come, check us out, hang out for sometime, 
then actually commit to buying a lot and then begin thinking about 
house plans and all that.  The reason building a house is stressful for 
some is that it requires 7 million thousand decisions.  My wife and I  
used a collaborative decision process, went together to look over 
cabinets, sinks and all the rest and pretty much came to the same 
conclusions about what we wanted.

The community had 5 homes in place when we joined, and we did spend a 
lot of time putting energy into the community.  It didn't seem unduly 
burdensome at the time, just the sort of normal hectic pace that I seem 
to travel at anyway.  I would Imagine that if 10 people wanted to build 
their house all at once, and had to figure out all the development 
stuff at the same time, it would be much more epic. This is what 
Rosewind went through, and perhaps someone from there would give a perspective.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood