Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Women's Suffrage and Coho Membership

[Becky Schaller (bschaller]

I wish I remembered the original email with which this thread originated.  
But with this analogy I want to get some clarification. 

I thought most cohousing communities had at least two sets of voting rules. 
One had to do with homeowner issues.  Should we start putting money away to
fix the roof on the commonhouse five or ten years from now?   These kinds of
votes are one vote for one household.  Renters don't vote. 

The other kind of issues have to do with the day to day running of the
community.  How many meals should we cook and eat in the common house?  
Renters do vote on these issues.  

Of course, this is only for those very rare occasions when we simply can't
reach consensus.  Then voting requires an 80% majority. 

I think the analogy of only landowning men having the right to vote is a
useful one to keep in mind.    I think there are also  other analogies to
consider.   One is that people who own a piece of property are the ones to
decide how to care for it.     Another is that since I live in Arizona, I
don't vote for the governor of California.



Becky Schaller
Sonora Cohousing
Tucson, Arizona
We just had our first landscaping/thermoculture workshop yesterday.   A
small group will make a recommendation to the community about how we will
landscape most of our common areas.  Each placita or cluster group will
decide how we will landscape each of the areas between their houses.

>
>I think it goes against the democratic tradition to have unequal votes.
>Let's see... the only people who could vote hundreds of years ago were
>landowning men. Sounds a little too close to the one house, one vote rule to
>me. And what about the renter-serfs?