Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Retrofit Cohousing

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Kevin writes:

> every house will turn over by then.  The time actually goes quite 
> quickly, and its is fun not knowing exactly what your community
> will be like t he next year.  It evolves and grows over time.

One thing I'll add to Kevin's excellent points - to do gradual  
conversion of an existing neighbourhood requires a different  
philosophy from doing regular cohousing.  You need to be very  
flexible and not demand complete control over the situation.

It could be argued that regular, built-from-scratch cohousing, is a  
control trip.  The group gets to decide every last damn little  
detail of what the place will be like.  Of course, they have to  
compromise with each other, but compared to moving into a place that  
someone else built they have a lot of control over the final  
outcome.

Gradually converting an existing neighbourhood is not like this at  
all.  There are major uncertainties at all times (Kevin elucidated a  
number).  When you start, you don't really know where the  
boundaries will be, who will live there, or what it will look like.   
You have to be willing to live with that (or learn to live with  
it).  At any time another house might come in to the community and  
suddenly, *damn*, where we decided to put the compost heaps doesn't  
make sense any more, that tree I put in two years ago has to be  
moved, and there's a big pile of the old neighbour's junk sitting in  
the middle of *our* common back yard.

Speaking personally, this has been difficult for me to adapt to,  
but I also think it has been very good for me.  My tendency is to  
want a lot of control - but I have come to find the changes and  
uncertainty exhilarating.

I differ with Kevin a little bit on the need to plan 5 or 10 years  
ahead - I don't believe this is possible in such an uncertain  
situation.  What we have had to do is have a lot of trust in our  
process.  We like each other and work well as a group together, and  
often when we cannot arrange something the way we would like, we  
have to just trust that it will get fixed when the time comes that  
it needs to be fixed (or can be fixed).  We believe in ourselves  
enough to think that if we, say, loan a few thousand dollars to the  
group without any formal guarantee, it will be repaid if it has to  
be.

My guess is that Kevin is thinking that some of our problem issues  
now could have been solved much more easily when we were small, *if*  
we had realized that they would be problems in the future.  And  
that's certainly true - but I don't believe that anyone could have  
foreseen how the evolution of the community would go well enough to  
solve the problems in advance.

Which is not to say that thinking hard about the issues Kevin  
raises wouldn't be a very valuable exercise.  But don't expect to be  
able to make decisions on all those points and stick to them -  
retrofitting a neighbourhood is, for the most part, a major feat of  
extemporization.

Stuart.
Briefly sticking his head out of his hole, but now descending back  
into the darkness to work some more.
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu
N St Cohousing.