Cohousing-L Mailing List: Building Community: A Newsletter on Coops, Condos, Cohousing, and Other New Neighborhoods

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Saturday at the Mid Atlantic Cohousing conference, I will be 
unveiling the first issue of my newsletter, Building Community: A 
newsletter on Coops, Condos, Cohousing, and Other New Neighborhoods. 
There are two missions for the newsletter are to:

1. Help small self-managed communities manage themselves more 
effectively, and
2. Encourage coops and condos to become more like cohousing.

Many of the problems of managing small communities are the same as 
those of small condos -- they are too small to hire a full-time manager 
and the work of managing facilities begins to overwhelm any sense of 
community that might otherwise naturally develop. Case in point, I 
heard last month of a small building of 12 condos in which the resident 
who had been managing the funds had taken off with 6 months of condo 
fees. In addition he had over the previous 6 months switched all his 
personal bills to the name of the condominium. In another building the 
board, mostly new members who had not lived in the building for 30 
years, approved the use of washers and dryers in apartments and before 
the board minutes were distributed, the plumbing in the building 
completely collapsed. It was not designed to carry the load and none of 
the new members had read previous board minutes that clearly stated 
that the use of dishwashers precluded the use of clothes washers 
upstairs. The growing sense of community that had been developing 
between the young and old residents collapsed.

The second mission comes from an experience of sitting in a shopping 
mall parking lot wondering why cohousing isn't growing by leaps and 
bounds. I looked up to see that I was surrounded by huge condo 
buildings and realized that each floor of those buildings could be a 
cohousing community. Why weren't they? Because no one had thought of 
it. The culture in condos is against it -- don't talk to your 
neighbors, it just starts fights. The Board's objective is to keep the 
residents quiet, uninvolved, and under control.

HELP NEEDED. For the first issue, I need questions. I want to do a q&A 
column and print letters to the editor. This being the first issue, I 
don't have any!!!!! So if you have a question or a comment, please send 
them. I've saved a few from the list and will be asking the senders if 
I can use them. Please send them to 
buildingcommunity [at] sharonvillines.com

The planned articles for the first issue are (at this point):

Coops and Condos: Are They All They Could Be?

Condo Commandos: The Real Purpose of Boards

The Future of Cohousing: Is It Stuck or What?

And in regular columns:
        Personally Speaking
        Book Review: Superbia!
        Facilities Research: Rubber Mulch
        Q & A
        Letters

This is a bimonthly newsletter, 6 issues a year, $48. Special 
introductory offer of $38 includes the right to make 5 copies of the 
newsletter for other residents of your community (not the rest of the 
world). Checks to Sharon Villines. Building Community, 6827 Fourth 
Street NW #213, Washington DC 20012.

I'll eventually have a web page up so you can subscribe online but for 
now I'm just getting the first draft done for Saturday. The Jan-Feb 
issue will be the first.

Thanks,
Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org