Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Rental Cohousing?

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

A community is not made of houses. It is made of relationships between
people. Cohousing is an intentional set of relationships, created amid a
housing paradigm. Once upon a time in Aspen a cohousing project was designed
as affordable housing. People came for the housing, not the community, and
the community failed, much to the dismay of the project originators. What
makes community work?  Would a group of people who joined a rental cohousing
community have the interest and follow through to make community work?
Would they have  high expectations for community life together, a strong
commitment to work through things? Or would they fracture at the first
crack, and dissolve into their own concerns, the hell with the neighbors?  

Community is a delicate flower when it first blooms, and it takes commitment
to relationships to give it endurance. I am not sure that group simply
moving into a finished building would have any notions of how to be a
community unless they had some build up work together. It is one thing to
read about cooperative life on a brochure, it is a very different thing to
live it, day in, day out.

Rob Sandelin
17 year resident
Sharingwood