Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Coho: empty nesters, singles, single parents

[Kevin Wolf (kjwolf]

On Thu, 29 Jun 1995 Mmariner [at] aol.com wrote:

> 
> 3.  Single parents
> 
> I'm wondering if it's a unique-to-Boulder phenomena that quite a few 1's and
> 2's show up in cohousing and not too many 3's.  A not-too-brilliant guess is
> that both time and money are more often available to 1's & 2's but not to
> 3's.

N St has always had a lot of single parents.  Now a number of them get 
married after being here, after which they are no longer single.  Then we 
have couples who break up, and stay in the community, which of course, 
makes them single parents again.  A few years ago, we had six single 
parents living in the community - all were renting.  Given that single 
parents are often on the low end of economic spectrum,  I bet the reason 
other communities don't have many single parents is because it costs too 
much to get in.

Also it takes a heck of a lot of meetings to set up a new community, and 
single parents are often short on time.  Retrofit co-housing is not so 
meeting intensive.

---
Kevin Wolf
724 N St
Davis, CA 95616
phone and fax: 916-758-4211