Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing for the working class

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

>Rob Sandelin <floriferous [at] msn.com> wrote: 
>> it takes dedication and work, nobody will do it for you.
>To which another responded:
>I found this comment puzzling. The assumption is that affordable
>homeownership is sought by people looking for subsidies or who are
>unwilling to apply the necessary dedication & work. This strikes me as
>classist.

I think I see what was meant here. At RoseWind, we talked a lot at the 
beginning about including housing that was somehow subsidized for 
affordability. And we spent a whole lot of time -- in addition to all the 
rest we were doing on the project -- trying to chase down programs, 
contact people, funding cycles, requirements, setting up meetings with 
Housing Authority people, etc. It did take a lot of work, and we never 
got to a productive place. In effect, we gave up because we ran out of 
available volunteer time. 

When we revisited the idea via a possible collaboration with Habitat, we 
also put in a lot of time and effort, and in this case succeeded in 
getting two homes subsidized via member donations (which provided the 
land), and member and other-volunteer work via the Habitat format. 

I think Rob's caution of "nobody will do it for you" was not suggesting 
that those who wanted subsidized homes wouldn't work to get it, but just 
pointing out, to forming communities, that including affordable housing 
via the usual routes, of government and other agency funding, is in fact 
very time consuming, for all involved. In our case, it was prohibitively 
so, at least till we worked with Habitat, and that was just 2 of our 24 
homes. 


Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing
Port Townsend Washington (Victorian seaport, music, art, nature)
http://www.rosewind.org
http://www.ptguide.com

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