Cohousing-L Mailing List: The affordable cohousing myth vs development reality

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Cohousing from scratch, which is the most common approach, is real estate
development. If it were cheap and easy, everyone would do it. It is neither
cheap nor easy. There is a balance point between things like cost of land
that you can develop and local economics. You might find a cheap piece of
land that you can develop into 30 homes, but often such places are far
outside of the local job economy. So you have to find that balance between
land cost and job market. In this balance you are competing against every
private developer who wants the same thing in order to make money. Since
these private developers are often well financed, experienced, and well
connected, in developing markets they win the best sites. 

When you see $350,000 cohousing units, look around the non-cohousing
neighborhood at the competing real estate. Almost always, that competition
is a similar price range. 

If eco-developments were cheap and easy, there would be thousands of them.
There are NONE in Washington state with 10 or more living spaces. Most
places that call themselves ecovillages are farms which have skirted land
use laws by having people live in substandard nonpermitted housing.
Government agencies in most states have pounds of regulations that affect
how land is used, how buildings can be built, etc. These regulations are in
place usually to either protect the government from lawsuits or to protect
land or people from shoddy development practices, and health and safety
issues. Many IC's fly under the radar of these rules. Cohousing is bank
financed, thus it has to abide by ALL the development game rules and be
fully legally permitted. These two things, Bank financing and Legally
permitted ensure that it is impossible to create real ecologically
sustaining housing. In order to do serious ecologically sustainable
building, you have to do private financing and either duck under or spend
enormous time and money and effort to get legally permitted. Way out in the
country you can do this, in developing areas, you find the scrutiny of the
building inspector. 

Why are there not dozens of straw bale communities? Because only a tiny few
financial places will fund them. 

So building 30 homes, which is sort of the standard scale of cohousing,
anywhere, always costs millions of dollars, which then translates into
market rate housing costs. If it is way over market rate, the banks
typically balk at giving loans. Typically all the "savings" by being a not
for profit development go into the commonhouse. Affordability comes not so
much in building, as in mortgage subsidies.

So, large scale (30 units or more) low cost eco-building has not yet been
managed in many places. I would also suspect that if such housing was
built,(supported by the banking industry) assuming it was desirable, resale
profit making would bring the cost up to local market rates within a decade
or so.  

So in my estimation the bottom line is, Cohousing, built from scratch which
has private ownership of homes that are bank mortgaged will only have
limited success in creating much low cost housing. The current estimate is
10% of cohousing could be called affordable. Other methods such as mortgage
support, housing renovation, rentals, and such will be the means for folks
on the lower end of the home ownership economic scale to find entry into
cohousing. Thus cohousing is going to hold the upper economic nitch of the
IC world. I would love to see a 30-60 home eco-development in Washington
created with alternative technologies, strong community values, and a low
cost. This is a vision of many people I have met over the years. But the
realities of doing so pretty much make it impossible to accomplish.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood Cohousing, Snohomish Co, WA
Where renters are welcome, and the cobb house is habitable but not yet
permitable.


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