Cohousing-L Mailing List: Why cohousing should not be mission driven to be affordable housing

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

I disagree that it is, or should be, the mission of cohousing to provide
affordable housing. Cohousing does provide a small amount of green and
affordability and this is fine as is. No guilt accepted  or needed.

There are tons of other kinds of Intentional Communities which provide both
green and affordable as their missions. Several in the NW  are looking for
members and can accessed at www.ic.org/nica.

Cohousing is not a public service. It is an intentional community form
designed specifically to be attractive to the middle  and upper classes. The
basic tenants of cohousing are that is non-religious, private income, new
development, homeownership based. These are what makes cohousing attractive
as a community type to the middle class, and also to the banks and other
bureaucracies. To make cohousing affordable mission driven, in my opinion,
would be such a huge burden that it would lead to the extinction of
cohousing. The people that currently drive the development of it would  opt
out and  cohousing development would stop.

This is not to say that affordable  cohousing  should not exist. Its  just
not likely to expand much beyond perhaps a token 5-10% of built homes.

The middle class people that drive cohousing do so to meet their own needs
and desires, not to accomplish a mission. And this is OK. Affordability
mission centered community work is great stuff and there are lots of
organizations that do that work better. But it is not what drives cohousing
developers. Cohousers are motivated to create a better life for themselves.
Period. Anything else is secondary to that.

It is not an accident that the vast majority of cohousing is market rate
housing. It is that way because that is what the vast  majority of
cohousers seem to want it to be. They want their equity preserved if not
accumulated. This is one of the very first questions potential cohousers
ask, Can I sell my house?

I would be delighted to see the Feds (or some  .com gazillionaire) create a
pool of money that cohousing groups could apply for affordability grants so
some percentage  of any  cohousing project could be  affordable. But until
then, cohousing is a grassroots effort that is meeting the criteria of the
banks quite nicely. And that is a miracle of itself.

 Most existing cohousing has been created in the face of hostile banks,
local governments, etc. And still these middle class firebrands persevered
and built multi-family developments. Groups  of strangers volunteered
hundreds of hours using cooperative processes, and put thousands of dollars
of personal money at risk, in order to have more community for themselves
and their  children. That's not "progressive" it's RADICAL! And there are
dozens of these places, and every year more and more come on line.

Community building is great stuff. There are lots of niches for improving
relationships between neighbors of all kinds and there is tons of work to
do. So grab a  shovel and start planting those seeds. Cohousing is just one
of the packages the seeds come in. And if you expect  cohousing to change
dramatically from its  current form, and become a mission centered community
form to provide affordable housing, well, I think you are likely to be
disappointed.

Rob Sandelin
Northwest Intentional Communities Association