Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Phased move-in

[Raines Cohen (rc3-coho-L]

Kristin,
Congratulations on having the end in sight! I'm looking forward to visiting
Daybreak on one of my swings through Portland.

I think you'll find that as construction finishes, mortgages close, and
people move in to their new cohousing homes, people get too busy to post
much on the list. This phase tends to last for about a year, so move-in and
first-year stories are underrepresented in the Coho-L community.

There are precedents for phased development, especially if specifically
planned for in project design, but banks and cities are nervous, especially
these days, about being left to clean up after condo developers cash in on
the first few quick sales and leave town with an unfinished project. So,
they tend to require things like:

- Shared resources like common houses completed
- Completion bonds posted to guarantee that all elements will be finished
- Signed contracts with deposits on all remaining units

If your members are relying on investments in the construction loan to be
credited as down-payments as part of their purchase, or other funds rerouted
as "silent seconds" to help people with affordability, you may find it
impossible to close on those loans until all loans close; at Swan's Market
Cohousing (Oakland, CA), we worked for several years to coordinate with a
single lender to close 17 of the 20 loans simultaneously, so our loan to the
lender would get credited as a down-payment in the escrow process. A cash
buyer was able to close slightly ahead of the rest.

That said, I'd imagine any lender right now would be enthusiastic about
loaning on a fully-sold-in-advance green project, given the alternatives in
the market.

Separate from the financing, something to be aware of is that if some
members move in and get in the habit of community living without a common
house up and running, then it is often harder to build the habits of using
the CH, common meals, etc. into your routines. In addition, you can get into
"old" and "new" camps if you're not careful about integrating the early- and
later-movers together.

Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach http://www.CohousingCoach.com/
Planning for Sustainable Communities
at Berkeley (CA) Cohousing

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Kristin Wells <cbuilderdd [at] gmail.com> 
wrote:

>
> We are about half way through construction and it appears as though half of
> our buildings will be done a couple months ahead of the other half due to
> the way construction has moved around the site. We are interested in the
> possibility of allowing people to move in once their building is completed.
> I tried to look up this topic on the archives, but wasn't having much luck.
>
> Do any communities have experience with this? What did you find? Let me
> know
> if I need to explain more.