Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing for Senior Artists - Request from CNN

[Raines Cohen (rc3-coho-L]

I've been several times to visit Sandywoods Farm in Tiverton, Rhode Island
and met some of the folks.

Founded in 2010, they don't call it cohousing (although they do use the
term "intentional community,"). It is an arts community with a similar
physical arrangement to cohousing neighborhoods, but what we would call a
Common House has some additional functions.

There's both affordable rentals and market-rate lots and homes, and a
community art gallery and 150-seat performance space with commercial
kitchen and year-round weekly live music and regular dances and open mic.
Community garden plots are available in a Land Trust next-door. I don't
know how much independence the owners and renters have in running the
community. Learn more at:

http://www.sandywoodsfarm.org

There's some interesting history to it -- it was co-founded by Pete
Seeger's daughter, an artist (still showing at area crafts fairs), with she
and her "professor-turned-farmer" husband helping to finance the land
purchase, but later needing to foreclose on 4 lots to get their money back,
according to a 2015 newspaper article. The state provided more than $15
million in affordable-housing finance, including infrastructure loans that
took much longer than planned to pay back because of slow sales of the
market-rate lots.

Raines Cohen, Cohousing Coach, Cohousing California