Cohousing-L Mailing List: RE: RE: [C-L]_ HOAs in Cohousing

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

Condos and cohousing are both housing choices. In each, the buyer chooses
different things for different reasons. With some effort you can build some
community anywhere, however cohousing is community structured from the
start, thus it will unlikely ever appeal to more than a small subset of
people who are interested in such a lifestyle. So forget about mainstream,
its not likely to happen.  There is a huge gap, its not just housing, it’s a
way to live your life closely connected to the people who are your
neighbors. You choose this specifically when you join a cohousing group. You
usually choose the opposite with a condo, you choose little association with
your neighbors, and certainly nothing at all like what happens in a
community like cohousing. Here are some of the things from the last week
that might explain the difference:

My wife had foot surgery this week and neighbors brought us dinner, videos
and books. When we went away on a two week vacation, my neighbors created a
welcome home banner and hung it on my front door. Today I delivered bulk
food deliveries to several  neighbors, walking into their homes and putting
their frozen items in their refers. As a thank you for this someone brought
me homemade fresh muffins, still hot from the oven. People have signed up to
provide meals for a family that just had a baby, I was out of town and I am
three weeks down on the list. A couple had to suddenly move, and they had 12
people helping them pack the moving van yesterday. Some other folks
organized childcare and provided pizza dinner. This afternoon I had a two
conversation in the street that involved 15 of my neighbors, just hanging
out chatting.  The list of social interactions and service that life in
community brings goes on and on, and you can't get these things unless the
people you live with have signed up for this kind of relationship, which is
the baseline for cohousing. This is what makes it different, and for me,
what makes it special. 

Good luck trying to organize a condo into a more community centric place.
You might look up the book called, Building Community Anywhere, it has some
good ideas. There also used to be a Seattle Organization called Neighbornets
which had a website with some good ideas.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood Cohousing

-----Original Message-----
From: Marta Vanegas, Concordia Organizer
[mailto:admin [at] concordiacohousing.org] 
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 2:32 PM
To: CoHo-L
Subject: Fwd: RE: [C-L]_ HOAs in Cohousing

Rob Sandelin <floriferous [at] msn.com> wrote:
To remove the notion of community from cohousing, renders it something
entirely different than what it is. 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
---
Rob, 
 
Hey, hey, slower with the judgment!  Let's sit on the horse the other way,
shall we?  I wasn't gonna remove the notion of community from cohousing,
rather was pondering to attempt, at least in my condo complex, adding the
notion of community to condos.  Condos are an ecological choice, compared to
single family houses or macmansions.  Other affordable housing options
should not be poo-poo-ed on this forum...
 
Oh, participatory design process, consensus, and all, it's great, but
essentially, we're talking about housing, aren't we?  You said, without
community, cohousing has no point.  And without housing, cohousing has no
point either.  We are talking about building homes for people. 
 

And I think by now no one could trademark the word cohousing, if you want to
discuss this, we could... on another thread.



Marta R. Vanegas
Community Organizer
Concordia Cohousing
admin [at] concordiacohousing.org
www.concordiacohousing.org

"Be the change you wish to see in the world" - Mahatma Gandhi

Cohousing - Building an Old Fashioned Neighborhood in a New Way
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