Cohousing-L Mailing List: "Neighborhood" Cohousing or "Retrofit" Cohousing

[Kevin Wolf (kevin]

Hi Cohousing Activists,

I just finished speaking at the UK Cohousing Network's special conference
on Retrofit Cohousing.  They invited me because N Street Cohousing is a
premier example of how existing homes can be converted over time into a
vibrant cohousing community.  We have grown to 20+ houses and around 60
adults in the 25 years we have considered ourselves a cohousing community.

One thing that came out of this excellent event is the awareness that there
are problems with the word "retrofit" to describe what N Street and other
similar types of communities are doing.  We found out that people did not
attend because they thought it was about retrofiting existing buildings
into built choosing, similar to Doyle Street and Swans Market Cohousing
here in CA.

The word retrofit also doesn't describe the many ways in which "non built"
cohousing can develop and evolve.  "Built" cohousing is defined as all the
units coming on line more or less at the same time as one project.

One of the speakers at the UK conference described her group's effort to
buy homes in an inexpensive neighbourhood near Cardiff and evolve that into
cohousing in the years to come. Few of the members would have contiguous
homes. They'd like to buy a home near the entrance to the neighbourhood and
convert it into a common house with possible use as a cafe during the day
to help pay for it. It might also be rented out for non members to use as
well.  It is a different strategy to achieve the same goals as all of us
want to achieve in our cohousing communities.  In my opinion, the goals we
are pursuing are more important than the specific means by which we achieve
them, and the core elements of a cohousing community are a common house and
the gifting of our time cooking meals for each other.

So after the conference a few of us met for dinner and came up with a new
proposed word to describe the type of cohousing the grows over time and is
not built all at once - Neighborhood Cohousing.    We considered words like
Evolving Cohousing or   Starting Small Cohousing but like the robustness of
the word Neighborhood and all the potential in it.

By the way, N Street member houses have been spreading out over our
neighborhood with five of them no longer being contiguous and one of them
at least a block away, and a long time Friend of the Community (one of our
FOCers) lives a few blocks away.

We'd like to spark a discussion with the U.S cohousing community on whether
we should change from the word Retrofit to Neighborhood or another word to
define N Street types of cohousing from communities as being different from
cohousing communities that are built all at once from retrofitted old
buildings.

Thank you for weighing in.

Kevin
N Street Cohousing co-founder