Cohousing-L Mailing List: Anyone use Habitat for Humanity?

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

My question is--- have any cohousing groups worked with Habitat for 
Humanity? 
What was your experience? 

We have 20 lots at RoseWind Cohousing already owned (12 built and 
occupied) . We have 4-6 more home sites left.We want to get more young 
families into the project, and to do so we figure we need to make our 
buy-in as affordable as we can. 

We also need to raise a certain amount of money from our remaining lot 
sales, to provide the rest of our common house budget.

One idea that keeps recurring is to somehow hook up with the local 
Habitat for Humanity folks. Some concerns about whether their religious 
affiliations enter into the matter, and about if and how we, RoseWind 
Cohousing, could participate in the selection process, to be sure the 
selectees were interested in devoting time and energy to community, and 
were well-informed about what they were getting into. 

There may also be some hard-to-admit barely-conscious concerns that with 
subsidized housing one might end up with ---- well, I think of some of 
the families I worked with locally in a social-service capacity, with 
lots of substance abuse, domestic violence, loud wild parties, trashing 
of premises, abused or neglected children. Mostly we act confident that 
we would end up with healthy positive people that just have little money, 
but I sense a little ambivalence too. 

One of our members came up with a novel idea: what we need to get from 
lot sales is money for the common house construction. This man suggests 
that since Habitat has many  skilled builder types who are willing to 
donate labor, maybe we could "sell" them a lot or lots and take "payment" 
in the form of donated labor on our common house construction!  (Separate 
from their deal with the recipient family for sweat equity etc on their 
own home construction.) We are in dialogue with Habitat....  Tell us what 
you know!