Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Membership requirements / # of adults in household

[Elizabeth Stevenson (tamgoddess]

I have two answers to this question. Or more, depending...

One vote per household: The only time we ever worry about this is when we
need a consensus and have to have a majority of the households
*represented*. I'm pretty sure this is in our CC&Rs or bylaws somewhere.
This is a formality, since we could theoretically have a bunch of couples
show up and still not have a quorum, or 13 people from different households
and have enough for a quorum. In reality, if there are a lot of people who
don't show up, we're either going to put off the decision, or make it
conditional upon notifying the rest of the community and there being no
objections. I'm sure we've made the occasional not-terribly-important
"illegal" decision without counting to see if there were enough households
represented.

Once we have a quorum, either by counting or because there are so many
people we forget to count, it's one person, one vote for the purposes of
making decisions in a general meeting. There are several reasons for this:

People in the same household may not agree. Just because they are married,
or whatever, doesn't mean they don't have their own opinions. One vote per
household is a throwback to when women didn't have the vote.

Theoretically, when making a consensus decision, it's not about how many
people disagree with a majority opinion, but getting everyone to a decision
they can live with. Numbers of people are irrelevant.

The only reason to base it on households is if you were voting on a regular
basis, and had made the decision that economic interest was the most
important factor in decisions. Our community has 25 units in it. If each
household gets one vote because they theoretically own 1/25th of the
commons, then you have to grapple with unit size and percentage of HOA dues,
etc., which makes it even more complicated. For instance, how many votes
does a 4-bed unit with one person in it get versus a 1-bed with two people?

This is why we don't vote, anyway, right? It can never be truly fair. Ask
any minority. So, in the end, if you have a healthy consensus process, it
doesn't matter whether you vote by household or by person.

-- 
Liz Stevenson
Southside Park Cohousing
Sacramento, California
tamgoddess [at] attbi.com

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