Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Neighbours

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

> I also wonder why N-Street didn't make it into The CoHousing Book - maybe
> the next edition?

Chuck Durrett has made noises about putting it in the next edition.  I
do not know what their concrete plans are (if any).

I've not talked to Katey about this, but I think Chuck is a little bit
ambivalent about N St.  I think he thinks we are, or at least were, too
scruffy.  I think we also don't fit his model because our site plan was
not a product of any kind of intelligent process (just regular subdivision) -
though we have done our best to improve it after the fact.

He also said to me that he thought N St would not be widely replicated -
citing as evidence that almost all cohousing communities in Denmark were
built from scratch rather than grown amongst existing houses.

I don't believe this, personally.  There are several other examples
around the country of places similar to N St - either having thought of
it for themselves or inspired by our example.  There are far fewer places
of this kind than there are built-from-scratch communities.  But then
this method has received a great deal less publicity, so it's difficult
to judge how significant that is.

Incidentally, if you want to know more about N St, I wrote a piece about
us in the most recent Urban Ecologist.  There's a draft of the piece (minus
pictures) in N St web pages 
(http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/n_street.html).  The article must be ok 
because it provoked Chuck (Durrett) to call me
up the other night and *rail* at me about it :-).  (He didn't like the
fact that I claimed re-using existing suburban houses made us environmentally
sounder.)  We had a very good, very robust, discussion on the subject.
 
Stuart 

Stuart Staniford-Chen.
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu
http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/~stanifor/cohousing.html