Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: Encouraging Multigenerational Community: selective recruiting

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

The way you set this up is by the number of bedrooms in your development.
Small, one bedroom units are not attractive to couples with kids. Two and
three+ bedroom units are desirable for families with kids. So, in a thirty
home development you would want to have say 18 or so one bedroom units to
set up the ratios you state that you want.  Of course, this would then lock
you into those ratios. Are you sure you want to do this? If so, be clear
why.

In a forming group, with no actual real estate transactions involved, you
can use group social pressure to invite who you want. I was told once about
a group that simply only invited those they wanted to their randomly
scheduled meetings. Those who they wanted to drop  they simply stopped
sending meeting notices to. This is rude, and perhaps even unreasonable, but
I was told it worked. There were only a couple of people that they really
did not like, and I guess they got the message and went away.

I have seen this kind of thing once in my own group, where somebody shows an
interest and they don't fit in at all. They are simply not invited back and
their contact information is not kept. For example, to several peoples
astonishment, a fairly loud, and conservative couple, who made several
conservative political comments and commentaries on a visit, actually
inquired later about houses for sale. They were spurned and at dinner one
night there was much trash talk about them, how we didn't want those kind of
people, etc. Sheesh. Diversity was not desirable in that particular
instance. (This is all second hand, I was out of town that week)

There are ways to steer away people you don't want away, and steer people
you do want in. For example you can gloss over the hard stuff with people
you like, gently transition them, hold their hands as they struggle, go out
of your way to help them, tell them all the stuff they want to hear, how
great things are, etc. You can do the opposite as well to discourage people.
None of this is technically illegal, although the morality of it can be
debated. However, I think its a fair statement that this is done anyway, you
put more energy into people you like, than those you don't. This is true of
any stage of community.

Of course, your surface judgments about people are usually quite different
than once you get to know them and understand them better. But you all know
that already.


Rob Sandelin
Sky Valley Environments  <http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm>
Field skills training for student naturalists
Floriferous [at] msn.com


-----Original Message-----
From: cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org
[mailto:cohousing-l-admin [at] cohousing.org]On Behalf Of curcio
Sent: Monday, January 27, 2003 9:34 AM
To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
Subject: [C-L]_Encouraging Multigenerational Community



We are a forming Cohousing community in Santa Cruz hoping to be entering an
agreement in a developer driven project very soon.  On a visit to another
cohousing community, we were told that it was benificial to have restricted
membership to one third families, one third couples and one third singles.
There is some interest in our group to this idea but we need more
information.  I would like to know what experience other groups have had
with or without this type of arrangement.  Without this restriction, what
type of membership should we expect?


--
Jon Curcio
Santa Cruz Cohousing
e-mail: curcio [at] cruzio.com



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