Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Age Diversity in Groups

[Ginny Moreland (vmoreland]

Thank you, Howard!  As a member of East Lake Commons, with 60 units under
contract (and seven more to go), I can testify that this seems to be the
case.  Although only about half of our households are living on site, we've
been marveling and the lovely way our age diversity has been working out.
We range from 84 down to 8 weeks, and another infant due this summer.  Even
though many of our households do not have children at all, there seems to be
lots of little pods of 2 to 4 kids, close in age, and of course the ten year
olds do spend some time with the six year olds too.

It's also true that the homes were not super small.  Many with kids have
bought three bedroom models and even added additional rooms in the attic.  I
also blush to admit that the homes were all plumbed for individual laundry
and most of us have put in washers and dryers.  (Though the common house
will have some, and it will be done in a month or two.)   I'm not
recommending that course, but some of our families do like it that way.

Can't tell if advantages like this will outweigh the difficulties of being
so large, but we'll get back to you in two or three years.

Ginny Moreland
East Lake Commons
Decatur, GA

Where we're eagerly anticipating the first get together of our three Georgia
cohousing communities this Saturday, all prompted by Rob Sandelin's tour and
offer to do a workshop with us.



Howard Landman HOWARD [at] POLY.POLYAMORY.ORG
wrote:

In "A Pattern Language" they analyze the distribution of ages in the
population and what it means for kids in a housing cluster.  The
conclusion is that to have a reasonable probablility of having enough
kids in each age group for each other to play with, you need to have
over 50 families in the cluster.  This assumes the cluster roughly
matches the age distribution of the population at large.