Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Site Driven CoHousing

[fmancino (fmancino]

On Tue, 17 Oct 1995, Joani Blank wrote:

> Okay, Zev, let's see if anyone wants to opine on this: 
> 
> At the conference Katie (McCamant) suggested that given how many groups have
> given up in exhaustion because they cannot tie down and proceed on a site,
> or because they found themselves trying to do what developers do
> professionally with no background for same, perhaps a different approach is
(snip)
> Does anyone want to jump into this one?

My experience with trying to develop coho led me to precisely that 
conclusion: it is so much easier to develop coho when you have a 
developable site than when you do not have one, which is another way of 
saying that using concensus decisionmaking for finding and developing a 
site rarely pays off (this may only be true for those areas where land 
prices are high, and there is some competition of developable sites, a 
condition all to familiar to those in this DC area). The problem with the 
developer approach to coho is finding one that has the resources, is 
honest, and is interested in developing cohousing.  We talked to 
developers about cohousing, and the reaction (from those meeting the 
above criteria) was, where is the market?, and where is your money?
Trying to get people to commit serious money in the  absence of a site, a 
plan, and some guarantee for success is equivalent to telemarketing.
My personal reaction to losing our best site because we were a few 
thousand (two or three commited members) short, is to make the process 
easier for people to buy in, that is, use the lot develoment model, and 
the bare-bones coho approach, and let everything else develop gradually 
over time (organically, as most villages, towns, and cities developed).
This stuff about values gives me the hives because I live so close to 
where our elected representatives mouth off daily about values yet behave in
quite a different fashion (though it is not just the boys and girls on 
the Hill: the other day we were treated to Sharpton, Barry, and Farahakan 
mouthing off about values in contradiction to their usual behaviour); as 
a student of ancient history, I tend to believe that virtue comes about 
from the actions of individuals not their sayings, and that also applies 
to cohousing development.

Frank Mancino