Cohousing-L Mailing List: Very Small Cohousing

[Erin Glaser Arlinghaus (glaser]

Hello list.  I have been dipping into the archives for a while and decided
to join up.  I am not absolutely sure that this is the best place to go
with questions on our nascent cohousing plan, but I'll give it a try.

My family (dh, 18mo ds, and myself) is in the early discussion/planning
stage of entering into a cohousing arrangement with just one other family
(husband, wife, nearly 4yo girl, and baby on the way).  We have been
good friends for a bit over a year; we are committed to gentle/continuum
parenting, homeschooling, and have similar goals on the way to voluntary
simplicity; both our families want to live in the city near libraries and
parks; we won't have a huge economic disparity; we share many core values.
We'd like to join forces for economic efficiency, to help create a larger
"extended family" for our children, to combat the single-family-home
isolation (especially for me and the other mother, neither of whom grew up
prepared for SAHMhood), and to share work.  At the same time we're not
trying to create a *single* nuclear family out of our two; we have agreed
that preserving our individual families' identities, integrity, and values
is of prime importance.

Our immediate dream is to buy an urban duplex with a big yard and garage,
keeping separate units but having common the yard, garden,
garage/workshop, porches, and perhaps having a common family room
depending on how the house is set up (e.g. finishing a shared basement or
knocking a hole in the separating wall).  (Separate kitchen/dining space
is desirable because of wheat allergy issues in one family).
Economically, my family needs to buy a home in the next year, but the
other family is not able to buy for about 2 years (the husband's still in
graduate school); we therefore anticipate that to make it happen, our
family must buy a duplex and rent out the other unit until the other
family can "buy in" when the husband graduates.

The *ultimate* dream is to convince a third family we're close to to join
us when we outgrow the duplex, by which time we'll all hopefully have the
means to buy a large lot and build a three-family home to fit us!

Anyway, that should serve as my introduction, and this should serve as a
general plea.  We are wondering if anyone has experience, insight, or
resources on the *small* co-housing plan -- specifically, on different
families co-owning a single property with multiple residential units.  In
our case it would just be two, but I can't imagine that it's much
different for 3 or 4 or 5 families, legally and economically I mean.

Also, reading over the threads about consensus has intrigued me.  With a
very small co-housing group we've pretty much figured that consensus
*must* rule on anything to do with the common areas.  We're discussing
dispute resolution options and also ways to make the finances/exit
strategy as fair as possible (our worst nightmare would be a financial
dispute that would ruin our friendship).  We would like to go into it
assuming that we will be able to reach consensus nearly all the time, but
with a specific dispute resolution strategy set out for those rare
failures of consensus.

I guess we're going to try our hand at a mission statement pretty soon,
and write some tentative bylaws.  We've been visiting open houses of
duplexes on the market and sharing our reactions to the homes -- so far we
are agreeing on the types of properties we like.

Any thoughts, comments, ideas, stories, links?

Erin Arlinghaus
not yet a cohouser...



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