Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Defining "the cohousing principle"

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

In my experience, the key element of making it work is the community
building that happens when people share their dreams and hopes, and work
together on a common goal. This is what ultimately makes it into a
community. The ONLY difference between a sterile, non-interactive condo and
a cohousing condo is the intention and will of the people who live there.
Without that guiding intention, you will have another overpriced condo. This
is why the resident involvement is important. All the "interactive design"
in the world does nothing if the people who live there chose NOT to
interact. Once you get built, in most cases, you will have no control over
who buys in later. If your "community sense" is weak, then over time it will
likely dissapear altogether. This is a very common way communities over
several years end up becoming non-intentional regular housing or folding up
all together.

One way to define "community" is the expectation of service, both to the
community and to individuals. Being willing to hold anothers baby so the
mother can eat in peace, being willing to take time out of your own busy
life to co-create the common good with others is a key part of the social
fabric that makes you into a community. WHen I ask people all over the
country, Why in the world did you ever get involved in such a
non-traditional housing project, the answer is almost always some desire for
community relationships, giving and getting service with a group of people
you care about. Read the mission statements on the websites of cohousing
groups and you will see this same theme over and over again. It is that
filter of intentionalty that brings in collarative ready people, people who
want to work and live with others.

I think this is absolutely key. If you bring in even 15% of the grops
population that really does NOT want to work together with others, I just
want to do my own thing, then you are probably going to lose all the
community minded folks over a period as they get thwarted and move on to
better scenes. I could give you a long list of failed communities where this
is exactly what happened, including at least one cohousing group, common
ground in Aspen, which apparently has removed the word Cohousing from their
name recently.

If all you do is move into real estate, how could you possibly hope to ever
have any sense of understanding and connection to each other? How can you
even know how to make decisions with a group at all? Where do you learn the
balance and boundaries between personal and group? You will be a bunch of
strangers, awkward and unsure of your intentions, and their will be very
little time spent to understand each other, to learn HOW to collaborate with
each other, to learn about each others needs and hopes.

When people move into an existing cohousing community, they are surrounded
by and assimilated into the community that already exists. The relationship
is extended to the newcomers and in turn they learn and reciprocate. It is
the pre-move in development state that sets this all up. People have been
working together for quite some time so when everybody moves in, the
challenges and problems are new, but the processes and connections are old
and well established. Try to get a group to move in without any connections
and processes and I think it would be unlikely to work very well, because
people will have  had no experiences in what to do or how to work together.

So the real estate development work is the training grounds for the
community processes that are needed to live together.

Of course, doing the real estate development work in not the only way to
work together and build bonds and closeness,and learn how to work with a
large group of diverse adults, but you will have to be VERY delibrate in
doing community building work and dream sharing and process building.
Otherwise, in my opinion based on watching lots of groups fail over the past
10 years, the community part will fade quickly. The intention for closer
relationships is what makes it go. When people move in with no community
intention, all the many trade-offs you have to make in order to live in a
community are not worth it, and so you stop making those tradeoffs and
eventually you have a nice condo where strangers who are neighbors might
wave at each other in the parking lot.

Rob Sandelin
Community Works! Group process and community building workshops for social
change groups.
10 year resident of Sharingwood Cohousing, Snohomish, WA