Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Charging to use community facilities, especially guest rooms

[Bonnie Fergusson (fergyb2]

Here at Swans Market every homeowners unit gets 3 free guest room nights a year 
and after that we get charged $10 per night for family and friends which we pay 
tax on and the remainder goes to pay utility and upkeep costs of the guest 
room.  We charge more, I think it’s $20 a night for “Community guests” which 
are mostly folks from other Cohousing communities, or occasionally others.  We 
came to this policy a few years after move in because some households never use 
the guest room and others use it a lot so it seemed to make sense to have a 
usage fee while still preserving some free night options.  We don’t charge for 
use of the rest of the common house at all, ever, partly for philosophical 
reasons and partly because the common House is used so frequently by all of us 
it would be a pain in the butt to administer and collect fees.  Guest room fees 
are charged to the unit and Community guests need to have a resident host who 
is responsible for collecting the money among other things.
   Currently we do not allow any use of the Guest room due to the pandemic as 
part of our attempt to keep the virus at bay.  Now that the case numbers are 
dropping we may open up again sometime in the next month or so, covid 
willing.Bonnie FergussonSwans Market CohousingOakland, CA

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On Sunday, March 6, 2022, 3:10 PM, Allison Tom <allisonrtom [at] gmail.com> 
wrote:

Hello list,

I am about to reengage with my community on the topic of charging guests
(in practice, usually hosts) a nightly fee for the use of our guest room.

I was gobsmacked when our working group proposed charging members to use
the common house for private events and to host guests in our guest
facilities.

For years I'd heard about how we could choose to live in smaller homes
because we had the facilities of the community at our disposal. I heard
repetitive statements such as "these facilities are an extension of our
homes."  And yet the working group proposed to charge families for events
such as children's birthday parties and for guest accommodations.

The suggestion to charge for common house use was dropped, and many members
have hosted events in our common house. But there was no uptake on my
arguments that charging for guest room use was contrary to the philosophy
of sharing resources to reduce our personal costs and our footprint.
Frankly, I don't understand how or why this one use can be separated from
all other free uses but I feel like an outsider in holding this opinion -
it's as if we aren't coming from the same world.

The policy is up for review again and I'm looking for help.

Please write to me personally at this address or respond to the list, as
you wish.

IF YOUR COMMUNITY DOES CHARGE for guest rooms or other facilities, what is
the philosophy behind that charge? How do you make sense of it? (This is
not a snarky question, I genuinely don't understand, especially when I ask
for a principled reason for charging.)

How much do you charge? Who is responsible for cleaning and prepping the
room for the next guest? Where do you live (urban, rural, high cost or
relatively low cost of living)?  What is the average size of a family
unit?  Do you charge for the use of other facilities such as common house,
common meeting space, workshop, bike room, kids' playroom?

IF YOUR COMMUNITY DOES NOT CHARGE for the use of guest rooms or other
facilities, what principles guided your community away from charging?

Then, if you will, the questions I posed for those who do charge:  Who is
responsible for cleaning and prepping the room for the next guest? Where do
you live (urban, rural, high cost or relatively low cost of living)?  What
is the average size of a family unit?  Do you charge for the use of other
facilities such as common house, common meeting space, workshop, bike room,
kids' playroom?

Thank you,

Allison Tom
Driftwood Village Cohousing, North Vancouver, BC
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