Cohousing-L Mailing List: Developer-driven communities

[Elana Kann (ekann]

Westwood Cohousing Community in Asheville, NC was developer-driven. My
parents and I owned the site, and we invited an interested group to develop
it (with us as members of the group) but after 2 years the group had made no
progress toward actual development and it fell apart. Faced in 1994 with the
choice to either abandon our goal of a cohousing community on the property
or to become the developers ourselves, we chose the latter with the huge
help of engineer Bill Fleming who functionally became our development
partner. After setting some criteria for development of our land and
creating a one-project development company, we invited new interested folks
to join us in a new member group working alongside the development company
and the professional design team it hired. Members were very involved in the
design phase, in marketing, and in financing our own construction loan pool
when banks would not work with us. 

 

We completed the project in 1998, and it's a huge success in many ways
including extreme energy efficiency with district (central) solar radiant
floor heating and hot water system and very tight building envelopes. It's a
beautiful, healthy place to live and many aspects of being a cohesive
community are coming together. But during construction the stresses within
the buyer group and between the buyer group and the development company were
huge. During development and in the first few years so many early members
left in strife that very few of the folks who were involved in the design
phase still live here 10 years later. It's taken us almost that long as a
community to recover from the strains of the development process, which
almost tore us apart and came close to folding the project.

 

Francoise, your idea of proceeding with your development team and finding
buyers later might actually save you and the future residents a lot of time
and heartache. Whether you can call it "cohousing" is something to consider.

 

--Elana Kann

Westwood Cohousing Community

Asheville, NC

 

 

 

 

Are there any other developer-driven communities in North America, where the
developer found the site and then built the group around it?  

Eastern Village is the only one I'm aware of. When I attended the cohousing
project management workshop a couple years ago, Katie McCamant called it the
Don Tucker model, and I got the impression it was the only one of its kind.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Don's first cohousing project, Takoma Village, wouldn't
be considered truly developer-driven because an existing group (Ann Zabaldo
et al) was recruiting him to do a cohousing project when he found the site.
But I believe this was also a case of the main group being built around the
site, instead of the other way around.

 

Katie

Eastern Village

Silver Spring, MD