Cohousing-L Mailing List: Developer vs Self-Developed

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

The theory has been advanced that perhaps developer-sourced cohousing has 
less going for it than resident-sourced, but as a member of a highly 
do-it-yourself community (RoseWind in Port Townsend WA) I would think 
that whatever differences there are, would mitigate over time. Yes, about 
5 of us shared an intense togetherness as we did several years of 
development work together, but more and more of our families are more 
recent than that, and have arrived on the scene after much of the work 
has been accomplished. I don't know that it's much different for them, 
than arriving after a developer did that work. 

A recent member startled me by observing that , "I guess there wasn't 
much to do in the early years, with few families living here." Hadn't a 
clue that some of us spent thousands of hours creating the entity that he 
just bought into.  

I'm hoping that pitching in together on our upcoming common house will 
give some of the "newbys" a new chance to do that sort of 
shoulder-to-shoulder stuff, with its resulting sense of ownership. But 
then someday folks will arrive and take the Common House as a given, and 
scarcely wonder how it got there. 

It is a good thing to create some written history of your project, for 
the sake of connecting in those who join later, whether you are hammering 
together buildings or group processes. 

Lynn Nadeau