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

[Rob Sandelin (Floriferous]

Will cohousing change the entire American Society? Unlikely. Will it ever 
become the majority of new housing stock built in America. Unlikely as well.  
Will it provide homes and neighborhoods that offer long term community 
opportunities, unavailable in traditional neighborhoods? Maybe.  As has been 
pointed out, Cohousing is just begining in America. In 50 years there may be 
10,000 cohousing neighborhoods, there may be 200. There may be none. 

New Urbanism is unlikely to amount to much in my opinion, because it has 
little guts or soul behind it. Its mostly spoutings from people who do not 
have the real talents to make it happen and once it stops becoming the last 
trendy topic in academic circles, it will go away.

Those of us who are living in cohousing now and creating it for the future, 
are active participants in a grand and somewhat idealist and visionary housing 
experiment. We are actually doing real stuff, learning real lessons, sharing 
them widely. The large townlets being built by the Disney Corporation and such 
will simply submerge into the same walled city mentality that surrounds many 
other developments these days. The reason I think this is that the people who 
live there will have few social decision skills, certainly not enough to 
create any kind of lasting bonds to each other. Without any bonds to your 
neighbors, there is no reason to get up at 1am in the morning to check out the 
ambulance at a neighbors house, and certainly not enough to go with them to 
the hospital, holding their hand as they have their first chest pain, heart 
attack scare. If I seem grumpy this evening, its because I got about 4 hours 
of sleep because of the above scenario happened at Sharingwood last night. Two 
of my neighbors followed the ambulance to the hostipal and held anothers 
neighbor hand as he went through probably one of the biggest scares any 50+ 
year old man can have: Major chest pains and numbness. He's back today, with 
tears in his eyes, not from chest pains, but from the recogition that even for 
all his cranky ways, he is loved by a lot of people.  

May our tribe increase. Not because of our housing architecture, but because 
of our decision making and commitment to each other. Cooperative 
collaboration, and community bonds are things worth exporting to the rest of 
America. They don't come with new Urbanism. They only come with community. I 
personally would never settle for less.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood resident of 6 years, as of yesterday, Oct. 15th.

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