Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Homeschooling & other impact issues

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Andrea Veltman Temescal Creek Cohousing aveltman [at] igc.org
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Dear Sheila,

I live in Temescal Creek Community (not to be confused with Temescal 
Commons) in Oakland, California. It's very urban here and probably 
different from many other communities.

>I sure would like to be able to back up my assertions with some hard
>data. If you live in a cohousing community, could you take a moment to 
>tell me
>
>* how many households live there,
8 currently, with 1 more probably being added in the next few months
(total 20 people, including 6 kids right now)

>* how many are empty-nesters,
nobody, the oldest person is in his early fourties

>* how many of them homeschool,
currently only one family (myself), but others might consider in the future

>* how many work from home,=20
one single women (plus me, if you consider homeschooling my son to be 
working from home - plus the father of the new family who is about to join us)

>*and whether or not you think you drive less (and how much less) now
>that you live in cohousing?
People drive a little bit less because on the two nights we have community 
dinners, they don't go anywhere else. One day a week I watch my neighbor's 
daughter, so she doesn't need to be driven to childcare. There are other 
occations like that, but sadly, here in the San Francisco Bay Area people 
keep themselves very busy, and everybody is very outward-oriented. This 
means that I still need to go places to find other parents and children for 
us to socialize with during the daytime, because everybody else is working 
and at school. Only myself and two other people are committed to drive less 
and are using bicycles regularly (although we have pretty good public 
transportation nearby). Also, we have done a lot of deconstruction on our 
retrofit community property because we are a cohousing community, which 
means many trips to the dump, to rent heavy equipment, buy huge loads of 
soil, etc. I wish we all drove less, but maybe "those kind of people" are 
not attracted to city cohousing.


>Questionnaires are a pain, I know, so thanks for taking the trouble.
Not bad at all - thanks for doing this!

Andrea Veltman
Temescal Creek Cohousing