Re: making cohousing affordable
From: Hafidha Sofia (hafidhaaogmail.com)
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2025 07:34:36 -0800 (PST)
Tl;dr: As I understand it, affordability is definitely a value of cohousing. 
The issue is that housing is incredibly and increasingly expensive these days 
(up 25% since 2019). 

Cohousing communities are created by people, for people. Not developers getting 
tax breaks, and not the gov't. 

So yes, we have a problem. It's now MUCH harder for ordinary people to create 
cohousing. 

Long read:
Nobody is out there creating communities for us - WE do. We make them, govern 
them, and maintain them. Communities are created because a handful of people 
who know each other decide to think collectively, and embark on the long 
journey toward a shared future. 

Unless they've died, the people selling their cohousing units have to be able 
to live somewhere else. If the general market is expensive, it follows that the 
cohousing market will be too.

I believe that buying undeveloped land and taking 5-10 years to dream it and 
build 15-25 units on it is 1) not meeting the demand, 2) more expensive now 
than it has ever been, 3) a bigger risk than it's ever been.

The model of cohousing creation has to adapt and expand from this model in 
order to be financially realistic. Otherwise new  "cohousing" will look more 
and more like self-funded gated communities.

Which is NOT a cohousing community.

Hafidha
Seattle WA




> On Jan 26, 2025, at 7:54 PM, b farris via Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] 
> cohousing.org> wrote:
> 
> You are not out of touch. Creating housing that is affordable doesn’t seem 
> to be a priority in cohousing. I was actually thinking it would be a good 
> idea to create a new one with affordability as an important part of the plan.
> Izzy

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