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

[Steve Welzer (stevenwelzer]

Sharon wrote:

> A developer couldn’t just build and sell 40+ units
> arranged around a green and a common house
> to 40 individual households who all move in
> at the same time and expect cohousing to happen on Monday.

A cohousing community has, of course, more to it than just a green and a
common house. What it is, what we’re talking about, is known worldwide by
now, after forty years of the movement’s growth.

> It’s about the hours that that process requires to build
> a community of people who can work together to get
> things done. It builds a core that then can incorporate more people.

Great ... if the core group has or can come up with the resources to get
things done. If we want to generalize this beyond the affluent, well, how
many groups can buy a parcel of land or purchase an old building to
retrofit, then hire professionals to deal with zoning, engineering,
legalities, site design, etc.?

And until there is something tangible that people can consider actually
residing in (a specific parcel of land in a particular place with some
floor plans, approximate pricing information, and a projected believable
timeline for move-in) there is a strong tendency for “incorporated members”
to come and go. Counterproductive is: As people come and go, they express
preferences that ultimately don’t mean much because, in the end, they don’t
purchase and move in, after all.

OK: Forty units. Ten occupied by the core group of households that endured
throughout. Thirty occupied by folks who peripherally watched the process
and liked what got constructed. Or who, living in California, saw an ad in
Communities Magazine and, having family in Pennsylvania, decided to
relocate into Pennsylvania cohousing. Thirty households who didn’t
participate in the designing or the pre-bonding, but among whom the ethos
of cohousing is understood and desired. The working-together and
self-management among all forty households actually does mostly take place
after move-in. Not all on Monday, of course. Over years.

Our movement needs to foster commitment-to-place and stability-in-place.
The EcoVillage at Ithaca has such a solid ecological and social foundation
that it should endure for seven generations, at least. After fifty years
few founding-designing households will be left. So what. The idea is that
the people who move in should know about cohousing, love cohousing, be
prepared to commit to the community and the place. They bond into and
become part of the self-governing community after-the-fact.

>I don’t know what would replicate that time and focus before
> suddenly taking charge of a $10 million housing complex.

What Jack Wilbern mentioned suggests why a cohousing developer would need
to be a special kind of developer, committed to “pulling 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
prospective future residents.”

If I was in my twenties I would aspire to establishing a cohousing
development company. It would be green-conscious, communitarian-minded, and
social-change-oriented.

Anyway, meanwhile, at the macro level we should be working on having
government entities adopt legislation or local ordinances that foster
eco-communitarian living options, as is being successfully done in Europe.

At the micro level and at the macro level ... our movement needs this and
humanity needs this.

Steve Welzer
Altair EcoVillage project participant