Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 128, Issue 11

[heidinys (heidinys]

Hi,

We built 17 years ago, twelve households.  And it took a lot --seven years-- to 
get to twelve.
and we were fine with twelve!
We eventually grew-- not bec we felt we were too small,  but  because we needed 
to buy the adjacent bit of property to protect our parking lot.  (We had a 
long--fifty or one hundred year lease on our parking lot.  However the party 
owning it went into foreclosure.  Our wonderful neighbor navigated the process 
of our buying that property and protecting our parking.)  
now we are happily at 18, room for one more household.

Ruth Hirsch
Cantines Island, Saugerties, NY
We have two homes for sale:  both essentially for empty nest/age related 
reasons.  We happily have a lot of children.  
Also, there is one building lot available.  
  
_________________________________________________________
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 12:02:41 -0700
From: John Goldberg <johngoldberg [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: [C-L]_ Minimum number of units

I would like to know the number of units of the smallest Cohousing communities 
and people's opinions about the smallest number of units necessary for a viable 
Cohousing community. Thank you 

John Goldberg

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 14:56:10 -0500
From: Jerry McIntire <jerry.mcintire [at] gmail.com>
To: Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org>
Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Minimum number of units

Hello John,

> From our planning in a rural area of Wisconsin, and from my experience
studying small group communication in university, I'd say twelve is the
minimum. When there are fewer, it is too easy to divide into factions and
it is more difficult to spread the work to be done sufficiently. Looking at
it more positively, you can build a more diverse community that benefits
from the unique contributions of a number of different thinkers when you
have twelve or more.

Because of the small size of our market (the largest town in our county is
5,000 people) we have set our minimum at twelve. We hope to have 15 or 18
homes when we're finished. We have the space on our property which is
twelve acres.

Jerry

-- 
Jerry McIntire
Stone's Throw Ecovillage, in the heart of Wisconsin's beautiful Driftless
region
http://stonesthrowcommunity.wordpress.com/
1-608-637-8018


On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 2:02 PM, John Goldberg <johngoldberg [at] hotmail.com>
wrote:

> 
> I would like to know the number of units of the smallest Cohousing
> communities and people's opinions about the smallest number of units
> necessary for a viable Cohousing community. Thank you
> 
> John Goldberg
>