Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Affordable housing with Habitat for Humanity

[Mona Loofs Samorzewski (mona]

G/day. For us non-Americans, would you be able to explain what  
Habitat for Humanity is?

We have had to work closely with our local State Housing authority  
who administered the money for our project (Aus$1.2 million). They  
didn't have a clue what cohousing was and required us to go through  
endless miles of red tape in order to purchase the land, design the  
community and get it built. As you could imagine this was  
particularly trying - it's hard enough to get everyone to agree and  
communicate effectively with the architect, let alone go through  
another level of bureaucracy... But we did it.

Our current agreement (in the process of being finalised) is that the  
funding covers 80% of the cost of the project. Therefore 80% of the  
houses need to be filled by low-income earners that roughly fit the  
Housing Department's criteria. The other 20% of the cost of the  
project will be taken out as a loan by our Co-operative, therefore  
20% of the houses can have people of any income. We have had a  
surprisingly high turnover (8 households in 5 years, averaging nearly  
one household leaving every 6 months), with most households buying  
their own home on leaving.

We have developed our own selection process and Housing has nothing  
to do with it - we certainly don't want to be dictated to as to who  
can live here (cohousing is definitely not for everyone). We are also  
a small community (11 houses and the commonhouse) and, currently,  
there are 9 single-mother households, one single male and one couple  
with children. There are 19 kids and 12 adults!!! As you can imagine  
all these things add up to meaning that we have a tension between a  
relatively high participation requirement (a community of 11  
households probably takes as much work as one of 15 or even 20 but  
there are less adults to do the work) and a fairly low participation  
ability (single parenting doesn't leave you much spare time).

Being rental has some disadvantes, such as being more work (setting  
rent based on income, collecting and tracking rent, chasing up  
arrears etc). But the advantages are that it is more affordable and  
it also provides us with a big pool of money that we can manage to  
suit the community. We have budgets for childcare so that people can  
attend meetings or other community events, we provide some  
landscaping supplies, free washing machine, drier and washing powder,  
free internet and printing access and electricity use is included in  
the rents. We base membership of the Co-operative on contributing  
both financially and work-wise, with certain repercussions occurring  
if you become more than four weeks in arrears. One example is that  
people cannot access their house 'improvement' funds (money budgetted  
to each house for permanent indoor or outdoor improvements) if they  
are in debt.

It can be a bit tricky to manage sometimes (our Tenancy Committee  
bears the brunt of it). And we are currently debating paying someone  
to clean the commonhouse and other such routine tasks to free us up  
for more creative work.

Anyway, we've been up and running for five years now, so our hassles  
with Housing are starting to feel like ancient history. The Housing  
Department considers us a feather in their cap and leaves us alone to  
manage ourselves (thank goodness).

Cheers, Mona from Australia


On 22/11/2005, at 5:59 AM, karen jacobsen wrote: