Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Is cohousing a consumer product?

[rebecca.selove (rebecca.selove]

Thanks everyone for the interesting comments.  As a member of a forming 
community I have a question for those of you who have lived in cohousing 10 
years or so: what do you think are the key principles that ought to be 
explained to people who are checking us out?RebeccaBurns Village and 
FarmTennessee Sent from my Galaxy
-------- Original message --------From: Philip Dowds <rpdowds [at] comcast.net> 
Date: 3/11/23  3:27 PM  (GMT-06:00) To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org Subject: 
Re: [C-L]_ Is cohousing a consumer product? There are some tricky premises 
buried in this conversation.  One of them is that the self-inflicted 
trial-by-fire of amateurs learning how to develop real estate is a critically 
important bonding experience, sort of like shared combat experience in wartime. 
 There may be some truth to this … but what does it say about the future and 
longevity of any specific cohousing community?Cornerstone (Cambridge, MA) is 
now more than two decades built and occupied.  I count the “founders” of 
Cornerstone as those who joined up, pitched in, and risked money before 
ground-breaking in 2000*.  Since then, unit turn-over has been low and slow, 
but steady.20-some years later, only one third of our units are occupied by 
founders.  The other two-thirds are owned and occupied by people who missed out 
on the hair-raising development experience, and (mostly) on the organizing 
meetings that took place during the construction phase.  Several of our units 
are occupied by recent purchasers who bought in during the depths of pandemic, 
when we all wore masks and had no community meals.  Some of the replacement 
households had already lived in community, or had a gift for the life style.  
Others, maybe not quite so much.I could detail out what I see as stages in our 
community evolution, but that’s not my point.  My point is that if cohousing 
has a future, it’s because it sustains and offers a durable culture that lives 
on and evolves, while specific households come and go.  Personally, I am very 
comfortable with imagining a Cambridge of Tomorrow that has 20 established 
cohousing alternatives, but with very few surviving founders.  I’d be surprised 
if *all* these alternatives are *equally* elder-focused, or kid-friendly, or 
vegan, or car- phobic, or “sociocratic”, or self-managing, or income-diverse.  
In this model, shoppers are both welcome and necessary — and variety of product 
choice is a plus.------------------Thanks, RPD617.460.4549 * Incidentally, 
that’s not me.  The DowdsHouse did not move to Cornerstone until 2007.On March 
11, 2023 at 2:23:01 PM, Sharon Villines via Cohousing-L (cohousing-l [at] 
cohousing.org) wrote:Wonderful thread on the ability/inability to find a place 
in cohousing. It brings to mind two experiences and one conclusion:1. When I 
went to my first cohousing conference I was surprised at how many people were 
there not to learn how to form a community but how to find one. I was only 
meeting people who were shopping. And they were shopping far and wide.2. When I 
much later tried to build a forum for people who were committed to and needed a 
cohousing community in which the units cost $100,000 or less, it didn’t work. 
The major reason was that no cluster of people formed that wanted to work on 
forming a specific community in a specific place. No commitment to a solution 
specific enough to materialize it.Cohousing communities are created; they 
aren’t found.  Your perfect community can’t exist until you are in 
it.Sharon—————Sharon Villines, Washington DCWe don’t agonize, we organize. — 
Nancy 
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