Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Budget Surplus

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Aug 24, 2024, at 6:04 AM, R Philip Dowds via Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] 
> cohousing.org> wrote:

> We have debates about whether a particular expenditure — refinish the floor? 
> upgrade to heat pumps? buy more yardwork services? — is “affordable” or not.  
> These debates, however, are impeded by two serious obstacles:
>     (1) We do not have, and do not expect to get, any actual information 
> about household finances; and …
>     (2) We haven’t a clue about what the *community* can or should do, if the 
> cost of living at Cornerstone is getting beyond the means of some of our 
> households.

I’ve been involved with a few pay-what-you-can groups since the 1960s. This is 
a long sharing of my experience with this issue because we are all in this 
situation. It’s called adulthood in cohousing. We desire to have a community 
that can include everyone as equals and in the end, we can’t make it work 
without giving up more than we are willing to give up.

I have decided that I can’t accept different standards for members of a group 
when members are equally dependent on each other and there is no transparency. 
I doubt if that would ever work outside a religious context where the values 
also involve shared beliefs that are not measurable. If people give more money 
they are viewed as more saintly, for example. Ego is involved.

In a cooperative school, a car-sharing group, cohousing communities, etc., 
there are required expenses. “Required” is decided by the group. If one member 
doesn’t pay at all or contributes less, another has to contribute more. 

The expectations are usually that someone needs to pay less. I don’t know of 
any situation in which it was decided that someone should pay more because they 
have inherited wealth, for example. The adjustment is always discussed on the 
other end.

Even with transparency so you could compare incomes and expenses, how would you 
decide that this household should pay more or less? This family has 5 children 
and this one has none? This one has high medical bills because they choose a 
certain lifestyle and that one doesn’t because they don’t go to health spas 
twice a year. 

An artist in a cooperative gallery thought she should be relieved of 
expectations for the summer because it was so hard for her to go to the 
Hamptons to open the house every year and give parties her husband expected for 
business friends. (No joke. True story.)

We all know how unfair subsidies for college tuition, for example, are or feel. 
Women are particularly aware of unequal standards because they have been told 
outright that they are paid less because the men are supporting families. 

Rosewind seems to have a good system of fees being adjusted each year based on 
what people are willing to pay. And they have a process for adjusting 
individual fees both up as well as down. It’s part of their normal budget 
process.

It has worked for us with individual commitments. During the pandemic, 
individuals contributed to a private fund that two people managed. Anyone could 
request help and it was a private transaction. Who contributed and who 
requested was private. Not secret just private. Either person could have 
revealed what they had contributed or received. In other cases, individuals 
loaned money to another household with a letter of agreement to repay the loan.

In one community, a person who had lost their job and returned to college with 
2 children reported that every month someone left $200 in their cubby. They 
never knew who contributed, but it was the difference between being able to 
complete their degree, feed the children, and dropping out.

It has also worked with some major items that some people wanted more than 
others—a steel fence and a universal gym. A certain amount was paid out of 
community funds and various people contributed to make up the difference. We’ve 
not had, as far as I know, any problems with anyone feeling bad for not 
contributing more or expecting undue gratitude for having contributed more. It 
hasn’t as people often fear created any kind of class differences.

When “forgiveness” happens at the institutional level, everyone who 
participates has to agree to the conditions. Outside of the cases where units 
have been built as part of government subsidies for affordable housing and have 
limits placed on the fees they pay, it becomes very complicated to have 
variable fees when the fees have to meet all expenses. Someone has to pay more.

Another true story: A group organized to figure out how to establish a fund 
that would be used to pay the fees of a household that temporarily couldn’t 
afford fees. Before the group completed a plan, one household became 5 months 
behind on paying fees—the only time that had happened here. When the name of 
the person got out, the group disbanded. The kind of household they wanted to 
subsidize was not this one. They could see that it would be very hard to make 
judgments about who was deserving because it involved deciding who was not.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org