Cohousing-L Mailing List: More Affordable Cohousing Models

[Jenny Guy (jenstermeister]

Our group, Eastlake Cohousing in Oakland, CA is planning to buy an existing
apartment building and move in gradually as the existing tenants move out
over time.  No pressure, anyone already living there when we buy can stay as
long as they want, whether or not they join the community.

Within the first year, we'll start using one unit as our common house, and
few years down the road, we plan to remodel 3 units into a glorious common
house.

This will be much more affordable than building new.  I'm excited to see
that new-build cohousing is picking up again; I love it when a new community
is built!  But for those of us who can't afford that, I think this will turn
out to be a very nice alternative.  New Brighton Cohousing near Santa Cruz,
CA has already done this.

We are looking at apartment buildings with central courtyards, where all the
front doors open onto the courtyard.  If we were brave enough to move into a
shakier neighborhood, we could buy several bungalows on a block and take
down the back yard fences, which would give us a really glorious common
yard.

Jenny Guy
Eastlake Cohousing, Oakland CA (not to be confused with East Lake Commons
Cohousing in Georgia)
also known as North Oakland Cohousing (since our first potential site was in
North Oakland)
http://north-oakland-cohousing.org/

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 4:54 AM, Zev Paiss <zpaiss [at] comcast.net> wrote:

>
> Friends,
>
>   please consider adaptive
> reuse or banding together to purchase a neighborhood of abandoned
> homes and start the long conversion process in our failing
> communities. Cohousing has much to offer but we must steps outside our
> traditional model of new construction and look at the possibilities of
> conversion, increasingly collaborative design (think foreclosed
> McMansions), and rental communities as one future for this movement.
>
>