Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: So what does it cost?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Oct 24, 2006, at 12:12 AM, Tree Bressen wrote:

> And when you get to the design phase, remember to make sure your common
> dining room is big enough for most of the membership to sit together 
> in a
> circle for meetings as well as big enough for your group to eat 
> together
> comfortably without noise and crowding driving everyone crazy.

An excellent post from Tree outlining all the non-material needs of the 
community, each one vital. And she is exactly right in saying that they 
must be built into the budget early or you will never get them in 
later.

A point I would make in regard to having a dining room large enough for 
everyone to eat in -- we started with a dining room that would seat 60 
which ironically is the exact number of adults we will have when our 
current musical chairs of selling and buying is complete. What we found 
is that even 50 people eating in the room is an unpleasant experience 
-- too much noise, too much work, and as a result we had very few 
meals. When we started planning special interest meals (for want of a 
better description) we had more meals.

Also, a good number of the people at our large meals were actually 
guests, not residents. Only 2/3 of residents might want to show up at 
any given meal, even on a holiday, and on a weekday it is closer to 
1/3. Other communities have posted similar figures.

Probably this depends on the size of your community -- smaller 
communities having a larger proportion of people showing up. In a large 
community, there are many variables that reduce percentage of 
participants. We have a very high level of diversity from the desire to 
even eat a group meal ever to the desire to have early meals for kids 
to the desire to have kidless meals. Add that on top of vegan, veggie, 
and meat/only white meat and the clusters get small.

So I would agree that you need a room large enough so everyone can 
attend a meeting but not necessarily large enough to serve a meal to 
everyone. Since move-in we have turned not quite a 1/4 of our dining 
area into soft seating areas.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org