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

[Kathleen Lowry (kathleenlowrylpcclmft]

Has this group hired a cohousing project manager? 

> On Mar 12, 2023, at 4:57 PM, Steve Welzer <stevenwelzer [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>> 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
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