Cohousing-L Mailing List: Steve Welzer's Challenge to the cohousing 'system'

[Jack Wilbern (jaxaccount]

I think this is a very important discussion. Wonderland Hill had for years,
a developer driven system that seemed to capture the best of both worlds.
The developer pulled together the project, finding the land and setting up
the professional team - and the bone structure for a shared development LLC
made up of themselves and the future residents.  I think there was/is a
Canadian team doing something similar.

This allows for resident participation on those decisions that flavored the
project such that it reflected their desires, while reducing risk for the
developer with real data/purchasers rather guessing what the market would
want/buy.

They also budgeted and had either on staff, en famille or as a close set of
professionals, a best in class team to help the group work out
decision systems (facilitation, consensus, etc) as well as focusing them on
how they would manage their community upon project completion.

Helping create a slew of Wonderland Hill's seems like a path for reaching
what Steve thinks is a huge market.  And how do we check that statement; or
rather prove it to developers?

Jim? Katie? Chuck? Kim? Bryan? Laura? CohoUs?  What say you?

*JACK WILBERN, RA*
………………………….
Proud to be a Board Member at www.1ststagetysons.org
A New Theater For a New City

>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 16:56:26 -0400
> From: Steve Welzer <stevenwelzer [at] gmail.com>
> To: Cohousing-L [at] cohousing.org
> Subject: Re: [C-L]_ Is cohousing a consumer product?
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CANB6f8mLv9Fui9RR16Qp0aQdFSVrNKioNejg1MjiZfFXN0ENvA [at] mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> > 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
>
>