Cohousing-L Mailing List: Cohousing development slowing down?

[Joani Blank (joani]

At 03:16 AM 2/19/2005, Rob wrote:

> 78 built communities, which lets say average 40
> people makes cohousing a dominant part of the intentional Communities
> movement in terms of numbers of people in community

That looks to be true, if you think of cohousing as being a "part of the 
intentional communities
movement."  But I believe that very few cohousers got here because they 
were looking for an intentional community, and found this particular 
version of community suiting their needs.   Which is why I prefer to use 
the term intentional neighborhood to describe cohousing.

I think we could pretty easily show that most people come to cohousing 
because when they hear about it, they realize what has been missing in the 
neighborhoods they live in now. And they want to live in a place where they 
are much, much closer to their neighbors. It's a whole different population 
than sets out to find an intentional community to live in. And we've just 
begun to scratch the surface of that market.

There's going to be a big article about cohousing in the AARP magazine very 
soon. It is being written by Barry Yeoman, a nationally recognized and 
award-winning investigative journalist who is also a contributing editor to 
the AARP magazine. That publication goes to 3 million readers! And I expect 
we'll have a huge flood of inquiries after it comes out. (People who 
responded to the AARP newsletter article on elder cohousing a couple of 
months ago were probably disappointed to find that there are only two 
all-elder communities, one in early development, and one that isn't on 
The  Cohousing Association's communities list so I'm not even sure that 
they consider themselves cohousing--as we define it).

I'm all in favor of seeing elder cohousing communities being developed, but 
Barry's article focuses on multi-generational cohousing and the lives of 
older people who live there. It seems that most older people who live in 
cohousing currently want to be where they are precisely because there are 
younger adults and children there as well. They see it as a great 
alternative to retirement communities.  So I see us batting 78 to 0 (or 1)

I recently counted and found that the following states have the most 
completed communities:

California, 18;
Colorado, 10,
Washington, 9;
Massachusetts 8;
DC and environs, 5.

Two states have 4 each and the rest have 2,3 or 1.  I'd say lots of room to 
spread out particularly in populous states like Florida and Texas, in 
University towns and and in more big midwestern metropolitan areas! Seattle 
may have gotten saturated with cohousing (all but 2 of the 9 in Washington 
are in or near Seattle). Given this tremendous opportunity for growth, I 
hardly think that slightly slowing growth in the nation as a whole for a 
few years means a whole lot.

Joani
Swan's Market Cohousing
Oakland, CA

Joani Blank
510-834-7399
Cell: 510-387-1315
joani [at] swansway.com