Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Affordable cohousing

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Nov 16, 2004, at 12:10 PM, alberta maged wrote:

> I realized I want to live in a dorm style situation.  I love cooking, 
> but I sure as heck have a whole lotta other things I want to do other 
> than cook for myself all the time.  So I guess what I'm trying to 
> figure out is if there can be a way to create apartment/studio living 
> in or on the transit lines leading into the city and have an 
> intentional community foundation to it.

One of the best ways to get started with this kind of project is to 
have a model to work from. Years ago I saw a piece on 60 Minutes about 
"single room occupancy" in Seattle. A man was building them for the 
homeless, but in fact they were very much like hotel living in 
Manhattan in the 1920s and 30s. People lived in hotel rooms with a 
bath. Today they would include a small fridge and a cooktop, which were 
largely unavailable then, certainly not affordable. The hotels included 
a restaurant (or tea room) and a large lobby for lounging and meeting 
people--often other shops and services as well.

The famed Algonquin Hotel where many famous and poor writers lived was 
such a place -- a resident hotel. Cheap rooms for rent but there is no 
reason why they couldn't be condos as well. Or that there couldn't be 
two stories of such rooms over the commonhouse. I must say that the 
older I get and the more focused my life becomes, the less private 
space I need or want. But I do want private space and control over how 
the community around it works. I just want more time to focus on my 
work and less to focus on living tasks (cooking, cleaning, laundry, 
dusting, windows, etc.).

One of the facts in Superbia! is that before the great growth of the 
suburbs in the 1950s, it was normal to spend only 25% of one's income 
on housing. The norm now is 50%. That is a huge difference. Does it 
really provide more?

Sharon
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Sharon Villines, Editor and Publisher
Building Community: A Newsletter on Coops, Condos, Cohousing, and Other 
New Neighborhoods