Cohousing-L Mailing List: choosing a community name

[Marcia Zuckerman (marciazuckerman]

As Bay State Commons anticipates the completion of our building, we're also 
exploring changing our name. In this connection, we'd like to ask a question 
about naming — specifically, about the relationship of a coho's legal name on 
condo documents to the name it's known by publicly. 
Apparently it's common cohousing practice for a coho's public and legal names 
to be basically the same (e.g., XYZ Cohousing in public,  XYZ Condominium on 
the condo docs). In our case, we're also exploring the alternative: having the 
legal name on condo docs be different from the name we're known by publicly. So 
we'd really appreciate feedback from other cohousers.  
Is this also fairly common practice among cohos? If your community's legal and 
public names are different, could you share why you did it this way, and do you 
have any words of experience or advice to share? Also, did you decide to make 
any legal provision for your public name — e.g., a separate LLC, registering it 
as a Doing-Business-As name, or such? (State laws will vary, of course.)