Cohousing-L Mailing List: Investing in Community

[Collaborative Housing Society (cohosoc]

I previously posted a note about our evolving work with banks, etc. towards
creating a vehicle for faciliating and financing community-based development
(including cohousing).  In light of the recent calls to do this via
alternative investing, I thought I'd offer an update on our progress.

To start, I suggest that both "know-how" and access to capital are equally
important.  Note I said capital, and not just money - defining the need as
capital starts to allow the possibilities of "social capital" as well. . .

Therefore, we are working to create a sustainable organization - ie not
dependant on grants and charity - that can get the currently carefully
hoarded information on how development works to the communities where it
belongs.  Information is a form of capital as well, highly valued by the
money lenders and investors out there (in the form of a "track record")

To that end, I am currently working with Labour groups, churches, pension
funds *and* two of our major banks (and in Canada, that means MAJOR) to
create a vehicle for them to invest in community-based development, and in
the flow of financing, support a resource center.  So far, they're extremely
interested, even though the idea of co-operation was at first foreign to the
banks' modus operandi.

In short, we've identified a point of leverage which allows relatively small
sums of $$ to mobilize community groups to take charge of development and
redevelopment of their local communities.  The $$ comes from banks, pension
funds and venture capitalists, who (we hope) will be happy to participate
because it gives them access to markets that they currently are unable to
reach, and does so in a relatively low-risk environment.  In other words,
help these groups get together, pooling their resources to secure and
initate development, and you will get a chance to lend your money to them at
reasonable rates of return, with a much lower chance of losing your money
than the cross-your-fingers-and- hope-that-a-market-is-out-there approach
that currently drives the housing markets.

Part of the context for this proposal is that Ontario has recently suffered
a catastrophic failure of its immensely well-funded social housing programs,
from which banks profited rather well while bearing very little risk.  This
is not by any means intended to replace that rather byzantine construct, but
certainly, banks know that the community-based sector is one that they can
not ignore.  In fact, the reason this idea is being taken seriously so far
is that bankers are telling me that they have buckets of money they want and
need to lend, and would love to lend to community groups, since they know
that these entities tend to be more secure risks, and yet no one seems to be
knocking at the doors to the vault.

This is because the *support* groups need to get the point of speaking to
the bank (or developers, for that matter) just isn't there, no matter how
well-heeled these community groups are.  Ontario's banks have become used to
letting government do this messy work, and have forgetten how to cultivate
the markets they increasingly need to work with.

We could start up our own bank, but I refuse to let the monsters we live
with off the hook for their role in the broader community.  Anyway, the
Credit Union movement here in Ontario is very undercapitalized -
malnourished, as some would say - though we are trying to find ways to use
this corporation to bolster the CU's presence.  We are also trying to learn
from places like Vancouver, where VanCity Credit Union ($4 billion / 210,000
members) is putting community sustainability into practice with a broad
palatte of programs and enterprises - they created their own developer, for
example.

In the end, I am suggesting that any vehicle that can mobilize the pooled
resources of as many people as possible will be of immense benefit to
cohousing and other forms of community based development.  VanCity literally
shapes the development market in Vancouver through its lending activities.
We're a long way from $4 billion, but hey, you've got to start somewhere!

Russell Mawby
Collaborative Housing Society
cohosoc [at] web.apc.org

P.S.  I will be moving to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan as of April 1st to "do"
community-based development with the City.  I will remain involved in the
above CDC start-up, but Jon Harstone will become the lead co-ordinator, and
can be reached at (416) 538-7511 ext 109.  He will post his (new?) email
address shortly.  My email address will remain the same, for now anyway.