Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing vs. HOA Communities

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Aug 30, 2005, at 4:35 PM, Pete Holsberg wrote:

> Are you suggesting that cohousing residents manage their own property? 
> As volunteers? How big a community can an amateur property manager 
> manage?

Most do because they are small. And many  do not have a huge amount of 
common space because they are lot development models where each 
household maintains their own property. Only the commonhouse is jointly 
cleaned and maintained.

"Self-Managed" in cohousing most importantly means that the residents 
make all the decisions about how the property will be managed. The 
residents are not "held hostage" to a manager who decides how things 
will be done. The Board also does not have control (for good or bad!).

Eastern Village is an experiment in cohousing, actually. It's very 
large and many members are not interested in doing hands on maintenance 
work to manage the property but they do want to be directly involved in 
making decisions about programs, use of facilities, etc. Many people at 
Takoma Village are ready to hire out cleaning, which we have been doing 
ourselves. We do have a management company that takes the condo fees 
and pays bills but for a small condo they are very hard to find and not 
very good (an understatement).

A major difference between cohousing and traditional condos is the size 
of the commonspace. While the large and new condos have extensive 
facilities like party rooms, kitchens, offices, exercise rooms, etc., 
they are typically much smaller proportionately. The engineering 
company that did our reserve study said our common facilities would 
serve a condo of 400 units. We have 43 and find it too small (except 
when we clean and organize).

Our common facilities are also open and heavily used, comparatively. 
You don't have to go to the office and borrow a key. If one of our 
rooms is locked for safety or security reasons, we all have a key to 
it. We lock the kids room, for example, but all adults have a key and 
most kids over 8 have a key as well. We only lock it so an adult is 
responsible cleaning. Turn the key, clean the room!

The calendar for reserving a room for private use is on the web. You 
sign up.

Kids are welcome everywhere, pretty much all the time. In the kitchen, 
workshop, and office they need to be with an adult for safety (or the 
safety of the equipment).

Personally, I think large condos have much to learn from cohousing.

Sharon
---
Sharon Villines
Building Community: A Newsletter on Coops, Condos, Cohousing, and Other 
New Neighborhoods
http://www.buildingcommunitynews.org