Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: The dark days before a site

[Racheli&John (jnpalme]

** Reply to note from Tonka444 [at] aol.com Sat, 30 Dec 2000 10:53:19 -0600
>From Racheli

Hi Shelly,

Reading your post, I was wondering why you leave the
site search to two people who are not part of the group.

When we looked for a site, a whole bunch of us was involved,
once we understood that it will take a serious effort to find
one.  The city of Tucson (or the county, I forget which) has
a website with information about location, size, state of
"development" and ownership of every parcel of land.
We worked through it with a fine comb...  We wrote letters
to people whose land looked attractive to us; some of us biked,
and other drove to look at many places we didn't even
know existed (prior to the search).  We also got a real estate 
company to keep an eye open on our behalf.
Eventually, a piece of land which was in the process of being
sold to someone else when we first spotted it opened up, and 
we more or less snatched it.
It can't be overemphasized that you might have to become more
flexible in terms of what's acceptable to you.  Our site scared some
people initially (it isn't in an "upscale" neighborhood, and there was
a worry about safety).  It's also the case that no site pleases everybody... 

Good luck,
R.