Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Sharing Economy/Truly Capitalist

[John Sechrest (sechrest]

Exploring the question of removing Market from the cohousing process:

We can separate two issues apart: First, there is the cost of capital to
create the space/ community in the first place and there is the ongoing
membership and access to housing in the community.

We see that some cohousing groups have gone to a rental model, where they
have specifically made this separation. You can be in any unit, you pay on
a monthly basis for that unit and then you are able to flexibly move about.
The choice of "ownership" of the community assets and housing can be
reconstructed into several forms:
  1) Everyone joins a business/coop/nonprofit, which owns all of the units
and the community assets and pays "rent" for the units to cover ongoing
costs
   2) Common space is owned by the "owners association/condo/coop" with
individuals owning the living space in one unit.
  3) The common space is owned by some subset of the "owners" and all of
the units and lots are owned individually.

These different structures are selected for and against by several
different issues. One of the main issues is the offering for lower interest
rates and tax incentives for individuals to own a housing unit. You can get
banks to play and you can get government incentives to own a property. But
not to own a piece of a business/coop/non-profit that then owns the units.

Assuming for a moment that there is some third party / Land trust/
Agency/coop that owns all of a space with all of the units. And assuming
that there is a "rent" that is paid for occupying a unit to cover long term
issues like maintainence and development, then you could see that you could
offer access to a unit at a non-market price. The the question becomes:
What criteria do you use to decide who gets a unit?

There are many choices:
1) First come, first serve
2) Only based on income needs
3) Only based on special group membership needs
4) only based on lottery
5) only based on seniority

Or some combination of all of those.

If you don't use market as a way to address demand, then you use some other
form of filtering.

If there is a large demand for this type of unit, with a low supply , the
market solution would be an increased price. So we use available funds as a
filter for who gets into a space.

If this is not the preferred way of managing access to housing, then what
decision matrix would be the right one to allocate access to units?



On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 8:20 AM, Crystal Farmer <crystalbyrdfarmer [at] 
gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> As a Millennial, I do wonder what cohousing will become for our generation.
> Even though I'm in a forming community, I can't imagine living in one place
> for the next 20 years! I'm also thinking about the economic collapse and
> the proverbial kid returning home to live with the parents. Will our
> generation care much about building the capital to buy a home? How can
> cohousing meet the need for flexibility along with community?
>
> Crystal Farmer
> Charlotte Cohousing Community
>
> -----------------------
>
> Ponder the emerging worldview of Millennials who are shunning personal
> ownership of houses and cars, embracing social sharing (e.g. Uber, AirBnB,
> cooperative financing), and redefining alternative models of career and
> education (to obviate indebtedness) ? ?co-housing? (largely a product of
> the Boomer culture as we know it) will likely morph to something beyond a
> ?truly capitalist thing?.
>
> === Bill
>
> William New
> StillCreek Commons
> 94062-0951
> ----------------
>
> >
> >
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>


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