Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: A p.s. to Mandel's piece: Affordable Coho Options

['Judith Wisdom (wisdom]

Mary Ann Swain's offerings on ways to make coho affordable surely need to 
be investigated, and I, for one, will.  However, all of the housing 
developments sponsored as a Community Land Trust in Philadelphia, where I 
currently live, are for the permanent underclass and/or are racially or 
ethnically homogeneous and in urban neigbhorhoods that would make someone 
of any background who is culturally and educationally middle class 
extremely uncomfortable and feeling unsafe.  

They are nice low income ghettos, that is, nicer than the chaotic ghettos 
in which they sit, but they are ghettos within ghettos.

Just as the concept of class is complex, so is the notion of diversity, 
especially in small, close-knit communities.  You can be very highly 
educated, culturally sophisticated and various, yet poor financially 
(i.e., you're an artist, writer, torn asunder from your career by illness 
or injury, etc.).  In any community your life style, your cultural 
proclivities, your intellect, etc., would more represent your class than 
would your financial situation.  But it is your financial situation that 
determines where you can live. If coho remains ghettoized on the basis of 
income you, however, go to the ghetto based on income, where you might stick 
out like a sore thumb, have 
nothing in common with your neighbors, and may even be more lonely amd 
even unsafe than if you liven in anomic urban America.

The notion of asking HUD or a local housing authority to fund the purchase 
of units in  a more middle class (culturally middle class and 
economically so quite probably, or above) coho is intriguing.  Do they go 
for it?  It would allow less financially able people to find communities 
suitable for them socially.  So far I'm not sanguine.

Underneath this note is of course the knawing issue (to some) of how small 
planned communities can possibly be diverse in certain ways.  My idealism 
wants me to think it totally possible.  My life experience says that such 
diversity, alas, works best either in larger numbers or where neigbhors 
have lots less to do with one another.  I'd like to be told I'm wrong.

But one thing I must reiterate is that for the most part the highly 
disadvantaged permanent (or, so far, permanent) underclass are the ones 
who get occasional offerings for communities with public monies.  The 
newly disabled,  who slide into poverty from 
fancier cultural and educational and professional/artistic backgrounds can 
sometimes get help for INDIVIDUAL solutions (an apartment rental).

But Mary suggests more is possible.  I hope she is right.  And when I get 
more info on this I'll report what I find out.  

I also spoke with the group in Boston that Mary mentioned, and it was 
from them that I got the contacts that started me on this research a 
while ago and so discouraged me, 
the conclusions of which I report here, albeit just for the Philadelphia 
area.  The communities were all very low-income ghettos within ghettos 
for homogeneous groups of the permanent underclass.

Judith Wisdom
wisdom [at] pobox.upenn.edu