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

[Sarah Lesher (sarah.lesher]

Sunnyside Village, Marysville, WA, where I was a member until I found an
existing house in my present community, did/is doing it better than some of
the earlier communities where we tried to get things together just by
reading McCamant & Durrett. The founders, Jennie Lindberg and Dean Smith,
put their money into buying land, hiring a process consultant, hiring an
architect, and having preliminary site studies.

They're now I think 60% sold out in spite of the terrible timing of
starting right with the covid epidemic.
IMHO I think that process -- learning to listen and communicate -- may be
the most important part of the whole thing.  People do learn something
about each other during design workshops, but architecture isn't going to
make a community come together.  E.g. shared laundry -- might be good
environmentally to avoid duplication, but if you have only two machines
only one family can do it at a time, so no sitting around chatting.
Sharing meals, on the other hand, is essential, as is noise control in
dining areas.  But nothing beats having people learning to listen and
practice non-violent or other productive communication.

--Sarah Lesher
Cantine's Island

On Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 7:18 PM Melanie G <gomelaniego [at] gmail.com> wrote:

> I would be ever so curious what ultimately it is that you believe is the
> barrier to those folks staying long enough to make this dream happen.
>
> thank you so much for sharing all this here.  It has me wondering if some
> projects just are not meant to happen, or at least meant to happen even
> more slowly than any of us would like.
>
> melanie (in the tri state area)
>
>
> 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
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