Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: when all our men are dead and gone

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

First I'd like to say that I find this subject header distasteful but am 
keeping it for the sake of the thread.  Melanie said:
> I would love to have diversity of all kinds in cohousing; it's just that 
> the field seems for some reason to attract more women, and in the case of 
> our group, more people between 50 and 70. The question for some is whether 
> having a skewed demographic is fatal to cohousing, and I don't think it is.

Having your starting group skewed towards an older-to-elderly demographic 
may become  problematic when you're living in cohousing and there aren't 
enough people with the energy and/or physical ability to get most of the 
work done by members.  You can't expect the minority of younger more able 
folks to carry most of that load, and will have to plan for a significant 
expenditure for hiring out needed work.

As time goes by, the community will become more and more like Elder 
Cohousing, which is a fine thing in itself but has quite a different feel 
than the intergenerational model.  Maybe it would be best to plan for that 
from the git-go if the demographics are very much that way from the 
planning stage, instead of feeling disappointed later that things did not 
go according to the initial intergenerational vision.

It concerns me that communities that started out intergenerational will 
turn into de facto Elder Cohousing as homes are resold, with inevitable 
problems such as getting the work done, safety and security issues that are 
more pressing for older people, and probably other things too that could 
have been planned for initially if it was obvious how the community was 
going to end up demographically.

Probably the best answer is lots more publicity about why it's such a great 
way for young families to live, similar to the good amount of publicity 
I've seen in the last couple of years aimed directly at older folks.

   Muriel
   Shadowlake Village Cohousing
   Blacksburg, Virginia
   where we're reminding one another about tomorrow's primary election