Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: per household vs per person

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

>Has anyone dealt with the question of whether a single-person household
>should be considered the same as a couple household (with or without kids)
>re:
>- Work requirements
>- Participation in a committee
>- Common costs (common house, infrastructure, land)
>- Maintenance fee
>- contributing to cost of optional workshops or professionals like
>facilitators
At RoseWind Cohousing (Port Townsend WA) assessments are per household; 
our original buy-in price was per lot, thus also per household. 

We have no work requirements, but our work expectations are generally 
about individuals. Often couples end up doing different forms of 
participation: one person may do meetings, the other, hands-on work party 
stuff, for example. And we know that many factors figure into how much 
participation a person can do, including family obligations of all sorts, 
including watching kids. 

The one place where it was an issue, many years ago, was when we were 
determining the relative prices of our lots and decided to factor in a 
token "pioneer discount" of a thousand dollars lot-price reduction per 
year of participation (we are self developed and had put in thousands of 
hours in the first years). Most families were fine at the per-household 
basis, but one family wanted double, arguing that she had watched the 
kids so he could do the meetings. As a single mom who had met all day 
Saturdays, then watched someone else's kid all day Sundays in childcare 
exchange, this didn't seem valid. I believe we made at most a small 
compromise for that couple. Our pioneer discount remained based on 
household.