Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Elitist lifestyle or public good?

[Catherine Harper (tylik]

(I'm not quoting the original posting for space considerations.)

I think co-housing as exists is a bit on the elitist side.  People who are
going to live in cohousing communities need to be able to invest both the
time and money into the community, which will often involve years of
planning, not having an immediate place to live from all of this, etc.
etc.  Certainly, it's only a small part of the population that seems to be
intetrested.  (Obviously all this has been said before.)

I wonder how much you can change this and still have it be co-housing.
The extensive planning is a large part of what forms the community both in
the sense that what is built reflects the people, and that they become a
community in large part by going through this process.

In order for cohousing to become more accessible, it almost has to be
adopted at a city level -- cohousing as a type of subsidised housing, so
that it could become actually affordable.  Cohousing done by developers,
to take some (or almost all?) of the planning weight off of the potential
residents.  (By the way, for my tuppence, I think cohousing done by
developers -- who are willing to work closely with the residents -- is a
lovely idea.)

Would it still be cohousing, though?  Or something that we would recognise
as cohousing?  Communities form slowly.  I think one of the functional
strengths of cohousing is that it is so difficult to do -- people have go
through this process together in order to become a community they not only
have to want to be there, but they have to choose to be there and be
willing to work their tails off.  The fact that cohousing is hard is an
obstacle to overcome, on the one hand -- let's face it, nothing that
requires that much work is going to be considered by urban planners,
because mostly people don't have the energy (or at least aren't willing to
devote it to this sort of thing) and aren't willing to wait.  But if we
remove some of the barriers to cohousing, what do we have left -- a lot of
smallish, hopefully affordable dwellings connected by walkways, and a
common house.  I've seen plenty of condos that have a lot of shared
facilities that don't become cohousing...  why should this?

It would be interesting to compare housing developments that were planned
so as to foster community with cohousing communities, and see what the
different experiences are.  (Or has this been done?  I don't have enough
data.)  When I think of cohousing, to me it seems that it requires buy-in
at a level that cannot be planned by urban planners, that cannot be
legislated, and cannot be budgeted.  I think there are ideas out of
cohousing that are going to be very useful, and there might be better ways
of partnering cohousing groups with urban planners.  But I have trouble
seeing ways to leap the gap from the grass-roots sort of thing that I see
going with cohousing, to planning on a larger scale.

                                Catherine