Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: environmental initiatives

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Banks actually kill most the stuff you mention. A bank cares about resale,
thus they will not fund a place with composting toliets. Since cohousing is
often done as large capital projects, it has the same requirements as any
other such project in terms of fundability. Building deptartments are also
pretty stuffy about such things, and if you wanted to "go to the mat" on all
those issues, your project would take slightly longer than forever, in which
time all your prospective members and initial investors would have left
wanting their money back.

It's hugely difficult in almost anyplace to build 30 units of multi-family
housing. Doing so as a collaborative process with people who don't have
experience doing such, coupled with the cash flow and investment issues
ensures the flow towards least resistance.

There are TONS of Intentional Communities with composting toliets and
serious ecogolical elements. These places are self funded,tend to start
small and grow over time. www.IC.org has listings of several hundred such
places. In fact, this decade seems to spawned more such places than all of
the 60-70's combined. Eco community is happening all over, just not in
mainstream housing, such as cohousing. Its just too damn hard to get the
funding and large scale approvals.

(Besides, have you ever lived with a composting toliet? They are not always
much fun)

Rob Sandelin
Northwest Intentional Communties Association
Building a better society, one neighborhood at a time