Cohousing-L Mailing List: Bay Area Cohousing

[William New (wnew]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 09:45:56 -0500 Jerry McIntire <jerry.mcintire [at] 
gmail.com> wrote

> Tiny houses are one route to go, another is co-op houses. Being willing to 
> move
> out of the most popular places (the Bay Area, San Jose, etc.) certainly helps.

The expensive component of finding housing in an urban area (viz. SF Bay Area, 
San Jose) is the high price of land compared to lower-priced rural areas. 
Affordable housing in urban areas requires very high population density per 
acre of land in order to substantially drop the land cost alloted pro rata to 
each residence. High density residences lend themselves to co-operative sharing 
of the building - witness the popularity of Tenancy in Common (TIC) that San 
Francisco allows, permitting several families to share ownership in a single 
house.

A comparable arrangement would be sharing co-operative ownership of inexpensive 
land in a rural area, where each family/owner could construct or bring a “tiny 
house” on to the property, preferably atop a wheeled trailer.  Moving house in 
an urban area means packing up personal possesions and finding another 
residence, generally in another (fixed) building. This is the pain and 
uncertainty instrinsic to a landlord/rentor arrangement subject to market 
rental pressures, and is the rationale behind TIC for those who wish to escape 
the insecurity of rentals and the limited supply of residential properties 
currently demonstrated in the SF Bay Area. Moving residency in a rural area 
simply means pulling your trailer to another low-cost piece of land.

One advantage of urban living is proximity to public transportation, services, 
shops, schools, medical care and a variety of corporate employment, which 
create the predominant cost drivers that make urban land expensive for 
co-housing. By contrast, rural living must be organized differently to provide 
necessary access to these amenities, an add-on cost to the “cheap” land 
advantage.  However these costs are more under personal control in a rural 
setting, where they are largely "baked in" to urban land.

Suburban sites or small towns (between crowded urban and distant rural) are an 
interesting possibility.  There will still be transportation issues, but the 
distances involved are generally shorter than rural patterns. The land parcels 
are bigger than urban allotments, and it is easier to have gardens, chickens, 
bees, worksheds (and tiny houses) that are very difficult in cities. Around 
dying Rust-Belt cities or shrinking Mid West towns, suburbs are hollowing out 
and there are bargains to be had. Again, primary issues with non-urban choices 
will be transportation and isolation, both of which are aided by cooperative 
living and shared resources.

The increasingly expensive SF Bay Area has driven out many service workers, 
government employees, and single earner families toward the Central Valley, 
with 100-200 mile commutes. This hours-long single-driver daily commute is a 
primary market target for Elio [www.eliomotors.com] with their low-cost 
($6800), high-mileage (84 miles/gallon) full-highway-safety American-built 
vehicle. Full-disclosure: I have reserved two for our (suburban) co-housers.

Common wisdom is that the US population will increasingly concentrate in 
cities, which leaves a rapidly growing segment of abandoned rural/suburban land 
available at reasonable cost.  Rural inhabitants will have more flexibility to 
address the 21st century issues we all face shortly - population pressures, 
climate change, oil-peak, clean water, poor food, alternative energy, failing 
schools, job shortages, social strife, flat economics - assuming we can utilize 
lower-carbon transportion and Internet connectivity to interact with the 
outside world as needed.

I surmise the challenge of affordable housing will most impact debt-ridden 
under-employed Millenials and their retired but struggling grandparents, with 
out-of-work Recession-devastated Boomers soon joining them. These have the 
ingredients of mutually-supportive cross-generational co-housing. 
Urban/suburban/rural locales can all work, but it will take imagination and 
creativity to create a new housing model to replace obsolete Levittowns and 
suburban sprawl created post-WWII.

=== Bill

William New
StillCreek Commons
wnew [at] stillcreek.net