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

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

It could be instructive to examine Common Ground Cohousing in Aspen to see
what an entire project built for affordable housing might end up like. It's
a nice condo, and a nice place to live affordabily in Aspen, the highest
price real estate in the west. From the stories I have heard, I am not sure
it works very well as a community. The primary motivation was for the
affordable housing, and it seems, after a couple of years, the community
part sort of didn't work out very well.

People who want to live closer to their neighbors in an emotional connected
sense, work together to be part of something called a community make
connections happen because they want what community has to offer. If what
you want is low cost housing, once you move in, the work to maintain the
community may not get done, cause that's not why you are there. Just because
you attend a design workshop does not mean you have the interest or desire
for community living, nor would that experience by itself  give you the
motivation to see the joys and advantages of community life.

And as I have gone on and on about before, cohousing without community is
just a fancy condo project.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood