Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Re: affordable housing

[Shava Nerad (shava]

> The key element about this group is Commitment.  Every person is totally 
> committed to creating this community-With their hearts, their souls and 
> their fortunes and assets.  I believe they will succeed no matter what 
> happens to them. They are not investing in equity, they are building a 
> community.  Two of the families own homes and are selling them to move into 
> the community.
> 
Wow.  And so fast!

> This is not Cohousing but I offer it as an example of what commitment can 
> do towards creating low income housing, if living on 25 acres for $40K is 
> called low income in your vocabulary.  They expect to be able to live on 
> about $8,000 income a year.
> 
Wow.

> I think one of the most difficult barriers to affordability in cohousing is 
> the notion of Private ownership.  Having autonomous private space is 
> important, having private ownership of that space may not be.  Corporate 
> ownership of property might offer lots of advantages towards affordability, 
> especially if you can keep banks out of the equation.

This is the first disagreement on our list when we were starting up a
couple months ago.  I personally think we're going to end up with the 
entire facility in corporate ownership, but with very little money put
in up front by the residents.  This is the only way I could figure out
to put this project together that would get us past land use, and allow
us to build with our lack of capitalization.  

Everyone's so elated that we've found a way around the land use, I'm 
afraid to point out that this is how we're doing it...

Shava