Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: In a nutshell!

[Jim Snyder-Grant (jimsg]

"so, what is this cohousing thing, anyways?"

The one sentence version I sometimes tell people goes like:

"It's a neighborhood where the people that live there helped set up & 
run the neighborhood".

That's probably a little bit too broad, but it's a start: you didn't ask 
for an official  dictionary definition (we've tried that already on this 
list: it takes more words..) It gives enough scope to cover the various 
flavors of cohousing (retrofit/developer/lot model).

Then you could go on to talk about your project:

"For instance, here at Sad Car Acres, we want to create a place where we 
can walk or play between the houses without competing with cars, and 
where we can have a big house in the middle where we can have meals 
sometimes, or watch the olympics together".. or whatever your specialty 
is.

-Jim, New View cohousing at half moon hill, Acton MA.

Where we now only have one all-group business meeting a month, and one 
'listening' meeting a month: instead of the bad-old burnout days of 
development where we were meeting as a group every 10 days or more...but 
the common house committee is still meeting once/week, at the edge of 
burnout, but at least aware of it & doing stuff about it.
[1998: The Year of the New View Common House]. We also had our first 
transition in ownership since move-in: one of the free-standing units 
sold for original purchase price plus improvements to a family on the 
waiting list who had been living just over the hill from us for a 
while..


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com