Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Are Rules Helpful? WAS Environmental sensitivities in community?

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

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> I'm much more on Liz's side of this than on Sharon's, though I recognize
the validity of Sharon's objections to making rules that don't involve
safety. I want to know what is officially NOT okay in my community, as
determined by consensus, because I want to live in harmony with my
neighbors, and I want new people to have an easy one-stop place to find our
policies and expectations so they can live in harmony with us.

It wouldn't occur to everyone that there must be some policy about xyz
behavior if they never encountered it before, so they wouldn't think to
ask, and if it isn't actually formalized as a consensed-on policy, maybe
that is just my neighbor Sharon's view of what the rule ought to be about
xyz if she is the one I happened to ask.

The problem is that, other than paying dues, there are no penalties for
violating a rule. The only negative for you in violating a rule is that you
might lose social capital. The one rule we have a clear-cut way to enforce
is that you must pay your HOA dues, and it took us years to put that into
the Bylaws, after one household flipped us off and stopped paying dues.
They didn't care about losing social capital.

This lack of enforcement is infuriating for some of our members, given that
some other members are seen to have violated (or still be violating) some
rule and "getting away with it" -- but what are we supposed to do to the
violator?? This has been a real problem for us that has caused serious hard
feelings. We do have a team now working on this issue, and it will be very
interesting to see how that goes, since many of our members are "Sharons"
but some are "Lizzes," if I may put it that way.
  Muriel at Shadowlake Village