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

[Steve Welzer (stevenwelzer]

> 20-some years later, only one third of our units are occupied by founders.

Right. So I question the sacredness of: “A cohousing community must be
designed by its future residents.” Eventually every community will be
populated by residents who had nothing to do with the design.

“Consumer product” sounds cold and institutional. The lifeways we advocate
should be communitarian rather than institutional. But the paradigm of
having amateurs get together with good intentions and try to develop a
settlement of 30 houses fails far too often.

There is a huge demand for cohousing and I wish cohousing developers would
understand: “Build it and they will come.” Chuck Durrett won’t hear of it.
“That’s not cohousing” he says.

Well, since 2014 we’ve had a Meetup group called “EcoVillage New Jersey.”
It has over 800 members. They are clamoring to live in an intentional
community. They come to meetings, they give some volunteer time, they give
some money. They don’t know how to make a $10 million real estate
development come to fruition. And so, despite all the interest, there is
not yet a single cohousing or ecovillage-living option in the entire NJ-NYC
metropolitan area of 20 million people.

Have we really tried? I and/or friends have been involved with the
following:
. Mount Eden Ecovillage
. Wissahickon Village Cohousing
. Three Groves Ecovillage
. Concord Village Cohousing
. Bucks County Ecovillage
. Rocky Corner Cohousing
. Towaco Ecovillage
. plus groups of folks with high hopes looking seriously at parcels of land
in Andover, Jersey City, Clerico's Farm, Hillsborough, Trenton, Waterford,
and Hopewell.

The paradigm of “Build community first and then buy land and build on it”
actually results in interested people coming in, trying to bond, getting
impatient, needing to get on with their lives, and leaving. What I’ve
observed (where successful projects do eventually come to fruition) is that
until there is something really tangible, like a purchased property plus
some viable funding to actually build something, people come and go.
Usually they never do raise the needed money. Developers can do that. Few
groups of common people can.

Clustered housing. Cars parked on the periphery. A wonderful Common House.
Shared amenities. The promotion of a cohousing ethos. The essence has been
clear to me since I visited the first neighborhood of the EcoVillage at
Ithaca in 1996. I’ve wanted to live that way. I’ve disseminated videos like
this one far and wide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-uH36w9xg8

People constantly respond that they’d give anything to live that way. As
coordinator of the Meetup they say to me: “Please tell me when this becomes
available in our area.”

And it never yet has.

Steve Welzer
Altair EcoVillage project participant