Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: co-housing, build your own

[Rob Sandelin (Floriferous]

Sharingwood, which is one of several lot development model of cohousing, is a 
place where people design and can build their own homes themselves. We have 15 
homes and a commonhosue currently, and will be building another 14 homes in 
the future. Planning is the same in terms of site design, but individual home 
planning of course is not a group activity. Most lot development model 
projects have some sort of architectural guidelines that the group 
establishes. I don't think recruiting is much different than in capital 
project model cohousing where everything is designed and built all at once as 
one large capital project. There is much less up front capital risk, and the 
development capital requirements can be spread out over a number of years 
rather than gotten all at once. 

The advantages of lot development are that you don't have to have other 
peoples limitations guide your home. If somebody can't afford expensive, high 
quality windows, you don't have to give them up if you can. Conversley, if you 
can't afford something the group wants, you don't have to drop out, you can 
buy a cheaper alternative.

You can design and build the home you want without too many compromises.

You can build a wide variety of homes, from very small to very large.

You can owner/ build homes to save money.

Disadvantages to lot development are:

Construction can go on forever as people come in, one at a time and build 
custom homes.

Custom homes are 20% more expensive. There are few shared economies.

Depending on your architectural review guidelines there may not be much visual 
consistency between homes.

It can be difficult to raise funds for a commonhouse, and without a 
commonhouse you really have little community potential.

People don't get the programming and group design skills so if you design and 
build a bunch of custom homes and then tackle designing a commonhouse you will 
have considerable skill development required.


Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood Cohousing where the next home under construction starts next week.