Cohousing-L Mailing List: Diversity and affordability

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Craig Mosher in Berkeley   CraigMosher1 [at] aol.com 
is the author of the message below. 
It was posted by Fred the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org> 
because the message included HTML ;      PLEASE do not post HTML, see
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I've been gone a couple of weeks and just read the discussion on diversity 
and affordability. Sounds like a typical community meeting. Some really good 
thinking; some arguments. All grist for the mill. I am still interested in my 
original question, if anyone knows: 

How can I contact or get info on cohousing projects that have actually 
included subsidized units (using government or private money to cover 
subsidies) for low income people? Paul Fenn and Kay Argyle responded to this 
and I'll be in touch. Are there others? 

I'm also interested in other methods of allowing people of differing 
financial means, and differing amounts of time available for community work, 
to contribute according to their ability; recognizing some of the 
difficulties in defining ability that were raised so well. 

I'll be very interested to hear responses to Bruce's question about groups 
that have used the limited equity cooperative structure (or others) to cap 
the appreciation in market value that makes lower cost units unaffordable as 
market prices rise over time. Keeping affordable units affordable over time 
is tough, as Joani has reported at Swans Market in Oakland.

Re: the decision-making discussion - At Project ONE (an early 
cohousing/intentional community project in an 84,000 sq.ft. warehouse 
building in San Francisco in the 1970s) - we sometimes made decisions by the 
method we called, "Them that does the doing, does the deciding how." So if a 
hallway needed painting, the folks who showed up at the scheduled time for 
doing it (which was set at community meeting and known to all) got to pick 
the color scheme. There were several obvious problems with this, of course, 
but it led to some creative (in the eye of the beholder) work and fewer 
arguments, fewer long meetings, etc. Just another in the many variations on 
decision-making. 
Craig Mosher in Berkeley



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