Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: COmmunity based business and self insurance

[Rob Sandelin (Exchange) (Robsan]

Economics of home grown and home based business need to support the large
monthly mortgage payments that come with multi-million dollar housing
developments.  In a personal economy, this is no problem if you have the
skills, and connections to make it work.  In a community economy, this is a
scary assumption.  If your community credo is thou shalt work here and not
commute, you filter out everyone who can't or doesn't want to take that
risk.  I know of lots of communities that are communal and self supporting,
but their average cost of housing is less than what a cohouser pays for a
few months mortgage.  And of course, if you are self supporting, self
employed, the banks will look very hard at you as a mortgage risk, much
harder than someone who has worked for firm x for the past three years. The
highest default rate on mortgages comes from self employed folks, and banks
are hip to this.  

Agriculture as an income base for a community, is largely a romantic myth
-The number of small farms that are economically self sufficient is dropping
hugely. Particularly with the climate warming disasters currently happening
and which will accelerate in the future if the global warming evidence is
correct. You can of course defer some, or a great deal of your annual
community or personal food costs by agriculure, if you have folks who will
do the hours and hours of labor that requires. I lived on a farm, with
livestock, and its not easy work but it can be done, especially if you are
dedicated to 14 hour days. 

There are number of self supporting communities which do a mixture of
product creation, information dealing, and agriculture, and as far as I know
of, they are all communal economies. I am doubtful that you could have a
personal based economy system support a self sufficient community.  Maybe
there are examples of this in the communities movement somewhere I don't
know about?  In a communal economy, if the fungus kills your market tomatoe
crop, everyone suffers but no one starves.  In a personal based economic
system, if growing tomatoes is your cash for the mortgage, then if you lose
the crop you are out of luck and the bank forcloses.

One very cool advantage of group self employment however is that your
neighbors can create a pool and purchase a benefits package together,
reducing the costs for things like dental and medical insurance. THere was
discussion once about pooling all the self insured folks in the communities
movement to get a communities plan, but that died from lack of energy.  In
my area, as few as ten people can form a coverage group and get 15%
reduction in their out of pocket monthly costs.  The larger the pool, the
greater the reduction. Pool 200 people from cohousing groups in a particular
area and you might get a very nice chunk of savings.

Rob Sandelin
I tried being a farmer but it was too much work