Cohousing-L Mailing List: Multiple person households (sexual or not)

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

At the third annual cohousing convention, held in Seattle, there was a talk
about new family models. In this talk, the thesis went like this: In our
current economic place, it takes the income of two people to support home
ownership. In some places, including Seattle, it is beginning to take three
incomes.

Seattle has a well defined and very active poly community (using the term
community in its broadest sense). They have a newsletter, a website, well
attended social functions, etc. I understand Sanfrancisco and NY also have
such communities.

I was chatting up a Seattle banker on a flight home one day and in our
conversation he mentioned that applicatons and approvals for multiple owner
homeloans (Three or more unrelated people) have really taken off in Seattle,
San Francisco and NY.

Apparently in areas with hot housing markets, homeownership rules are
changing. According to this banker (not a very libral guy at all) ten years
ago loans to multiperson households were unheard of and would never have
been approved by people like him. Now they are merely one part of a wide
portfolio of offerings and not particularily hard to do.

So, if multifamily tribes are the logical and natural living condition, as
many anthropologists seem to insist, then multifamily households may be the
beginnings of a movement away from isolated nuclear families and back
towards tribes. Economics of homeownership may drive the trend, the benefits
of living such may increase it.

I personally know of 5 such households. Two of which are not sexually
partnered (at least not that they admit to) These are co-ownership home
situations, where the house ownership is shared, along with meals, and cars
and such.

There is a woman named Getz who is studying such households (can't recall
her first name) and apparently writing a book. She interviewed one of the
households I know and I also heard a story about her on NPR a year ago or
so. The religous right is on her case and trying to stop the publication of
her book I guess, which was the gist of the NPR story. I gathered the hot
issue is sex, but the real story is cooperation and the change of household
organization.

So, whether or not sex is involved, it appears in some places, household
make up is changing to three people.

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