Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: cheaper housing

[Fred H. Olson (fholson]

Scott Crowley   scowley [at] library.utah.edu
is the author of the message below but due to a problem it was posted
by the Fred the list manager: owner-cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org
--------------------  FORWARDED MESSAGE FOLLOWS --------------------


    I very much like this thread about how to make housing cheap 
enough to help extract ourselves from mortgage slavery.  Big subject.
One thing that new groups have an advantage of is that there are 
around 40 projects built.
    We had to hire an architect.  That cost us $100K.  For this we 
got a site design, construction drawings, and some construction 
oversight.  We probably could have cut off  1/3 of the cost by having 
utilized some combination of other groups' house 
plans.
    But how to overcome the copyright requirements which 
architects impose in their contracts ?
    We have also had hugely significant construction delays, mainly 
due to the fact that the construction company welched on the priority 
they assigned to our project.
     How to compel a construction company to abide by its promises ?
(They had the best references around.  And we felt we couldn't 
afford a $25K completion bond and a $35K full time on-site manager.)


- scott