Cohousing-L Mailing List: Involuntary Simplicity (was: Re: Resident Participation in Design)

[Fred H. Olson (fholson]

Howard Landman   howard [at] polyamory.org      River Rock Cohousing
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> 4. LIVING LIGHTER Thoughtful always leads to less and smaller.  If you
> give people time to think about it, they will figure out how to
> downsize.

Since this is one of my hot-buttons, I thought I should speak up.

Some people actually do have larger "needs" than others.  When I first
began to consider cohousing, we needed a place for 3 adults and 3 kids.
There was *NO* unit in our development, or any other one I've looked at,
that could hold that many people comfortably.  So we were forced to
consider buying *2* units to fit *1* family.  The only thing that made
it work at all was that I got divorced, and thus reduced my needs to
2 adults and sometimes a kid or two.  Even for that, we had to finish
off the unfinished basement of the largest unit available.

Cohousing groups tend to get get started by "voluntary simplicity" types.
The problem is, not everyone may be as spiritually elevated as them.
Some of us are in the process of slowly moving towards simplicity, but
haven't really gotten there yet.  For "the rest of us", the enforced
downsizing of cohousing becomes "involuntary simplicity" - our only
choices are to shoehorn ourselves in or leave the group.

Nowhere does this issue rear its ugly head more often than in the number,
size, spacing and arrangement of garages and parking.  V.S. types think
that cars are evil - this is sometimes so deep as to not even be a
conscious or verbalizable bias.  I know of *several* cohousing developments
in which the parking was a major disaster - spaces and garages are too
small, not enough room is left for turning, etc.  This is a common
blunder which is getting made over and over, and I think it's driven
directly by the V.S. folks' prejudices.

90% of the garages in our development are too narrow for my car to fit
into them.  And I have a *medium-sized* car.  I have been forced to
buy 2 garages (a double) so I can park 1 car and have it be covered.
I might be able to park a motorcycle next to it, but there is no way
in hell a second car will fit into my "2-car garage".

But I think large families are also perhaps subconsciously considered
evil.  Certainly, I have not seen any consideration made for them.
This is odd when you consider that everyone seems to want to make
cohousing affordable for low-income families, but that low-income
families tend to be larger than high-income ones.  There's some kind
of inherent contradiction here, I think.

        Howard Landman
        River Rock Cohousing