Cohousing-L Mailing List: Building community

[Cheryl Kliewer (c_kliewer]

Hello all,

This is my first time posting on this list, but I have found the list
helpful.  Our group developed a pet policy after reading about the cat
issues =)

Michael, I agree with your comments:
> Another opinion: There's no point in planning to build, let alone building
> or moving in, until the group has a set of agreements that everyone is
> comfortable with and will comply with consistently.  Then only people who
> are comfortable with those agreements would be permitted in later.
>
> A difficulty I have with cohousing as I often see it operating is that
many
> of the people involved are more concerned with housing than with
community.
> Community is based on communication, listening, respect, agreements,
> sharing, cooperation, and other qualities of thriving relationships, not
on
> how close people live to each other or how often they see each other.


We recently choose a non-profit developer over a for-profit developer we had
been working with.  The main reason for our shift was that the non-profit
developer understands community.  When we attempted to develop a contract
with the for-profit developer we realized that they did not "get" cohousing
or community building.  One example of this is that they planned to hand
over the marketing and selling of units to real-estate agents.  They
believed that if all the homes were not sold near move in we would need to
sell to the next buyer whether or not they were interested in community.
After we realized their lack of understanding about community we did more
research and found a very community-minded non-profit developer that we
are/were very excited about.

Of course once we solve one problem another one arises.  The owner of the
land we hoped to purchase said that we need to put half the money down on
our land Nov. 1, 2001 and pay the other half in March 2002.  The cost of our
land is $240,000 for 9 1/2 acres.

We only have five member families.  We meet to talk about this problem on
Monday night.  I fear that losing the land is the end of our project.  I
doubt our five families will pay half the money that quickly.  I do not know
if I have the energy to start over again and I fear that no one else will
lead the project.  We were hoping to complete site plans and do more
marketing before having to invest such a large amount of money.

At any rate, I agree that building the community is the most important part.
On the other hand, you can not have a cohousing community without land or
buildings.

Cheryl

Oak Park Village in Rochester, MN




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