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

[BilodeauA (BilodeauA]

Hi folks:

I've been monitoring this list for about six months, in the hopes that I
could find ideas that would get me into a cohousing situation myself.  

Well, I've concluded that there is indeed some kind of serious disconnect
between what ordinarily people can afford and what co-housers are doing.  

One project in my area is charging about $300,000 per home for the project,
from the estimates they sent me.  

Now you tell me -- are people who make enough to pay $300,000 mortgages
filled with free time to hang with their co-housing brethren?  Or are they
more likely to be invisible mortgage payers who scarcely know their
neighbors, if at all, given their heavy professional schedules?

(I know that I couldn't afford such a mortgage, though I have a pretty highly
paid professional job.  It takes all of my free time just to make the money I
DO have, and one of my principal concerns is that I wouldn't have enough to
give (time and relationship wise) to make it worth moving in with my
friends.)

I know that both of those pictures I've painted are extreme, and that actual
projects will fall somewhere in between a hippie love fest and a tarted up
suburban development project.

But I do see a serious problem with the whole idea if my friends and I
couldn't possibly afford to live together even we want to do so. (And we do!)
 Maybe someone here has lived on or knows more about kibbutzim...how do they
solve this problem?

- Anne