Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Is Affordability Wanted?

[Jim Snyder-Grant (Jim_Snyder-Grant.LOTUS]

Harry asked if coho professionals are getting paid as a percentage of 
construction, and thus have no incentive to investigate cost-saving solutions. 
Here's the story for New View (Acton MA, USA):

The architect is paid partiallly fixed price, partially by the hour. He has 
been active in cost-savings measures, both for the community and gor individual 
households.

Our development manager is paid a fixed fee: a small monthly fee plus big 
clumps at milestones. His incentive is to get us built, and to get us built 
soon.

Our developer is us: the 24 households have bankrolled the first million 
dollars, and the bank is taking us the rest of the way.

The general contractor was hired as the result of a bidding process (plus we 
had our professionals and group members check his work and his references). 
He's getting a fixed profit for the base construction, plus whatever he can 
make on customizations.

We haven't read or contributed much to the list on affordability issues because 
we've learned what we needed elsewhere. Budget has been a constant concern 
since we started, and takes a lot of our profesionals & committees' time to 
manage. We have a wide varity of economic circumstances in our group, so a lot 
of the effort has been about defining an affordable-enough base so that the 
most economically constrained families can keep going, while still allowing 
others to upgrade ina satisfactory way. 

We have rarely used the word 'marketing' in our efforts. We had both the pain 
and help of being one of the very first active cohousing groups in Boston, so 
we've always had more households interested than we could handle. All of our 
preliminary and final designs have been done with specific households in mind, 
but with the constraint that we wanted our architect to design the smallest 
number of base units possible, plus we needed to get conventional 20% or so 
financing for most of the units.

All of our professionals are earning less than they would be on a conventional 
development, in terms of a standard percent of development, but they only 
rarely complain. They each have enough love & respect for what we are doing 
that they put up with us & our 'funny' way of working with them (we ALWAYS make 
decisions at the last possible moment, for example).


Jim-Snyder-Grant [at] crd.lotus.com