Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: making cohousing affordable RE: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 252, Issue 21

[Sophie Rubin (yophiest]

I second Ty.

Affordability for a wider range of folks is a widely shared value among
most co-housers.

 I’m a professional “affordable” housing developer with a decade of
experience  who has worked on projects from micro units to large family
units in wood, concrete, steel, and mass timber - traditional construction,
panelized construction, and modular construction. I’ve worked ok
traditional tax credit projects (the standard model for income-restricted
affordable housing in the US) as well as non-tax-credit acquisition and
rehabilitation projects, including working with land trusts.

The people enabling the construction of co-housing (that is, prospective
co-housers) are never making the housing more expensive than necessary to
get an easily buildable and re-sellable unit.

It’s an extraordinarily complex issue and without financial subsidies -
public and/or private - or time and individual/community generosity (eg
units restricted after initial ownership or donated for affordability,
there are very few options for how to make units cheaper without otherwise
changing large portions of the cohousing model.

Doesn’t mean I don’t want people to continue to care, be creative, and try.

I just want folks who think the issue must be self-interest among the
majority of current or would-be cohousers to understand that, as Ty said,
it’s not a solvable problem without systemic changes.


On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 10:02 Ty Albright via Cohousing-L <
cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org> wrote:

> Re: Affordable coho.
>
> I have explored this in great length over the years.  The solution requires
> a fundamental change in how the housing industry works.  In short, its
> ultimately a political issue that requires change in regulations.
>
> The key issues are:
> 1). Municipality requitements and limitations which add cost to
> construction.  Some locations are worse than others.
> 2). The mortgage industry in entrenched in how it does business.  It's a
> well-oiled machine that generates and issues mortgages in great volume.
> However - with few exceptions - mortgages are only available for "tired and
> true" product types - such things as wood framed 3BR / 2Bth single family
> detached homes are easily understood in the underwriting process and can be
> issued a mortgage easily.  Alternative (i.e. "not proven") technology and
> construction techniques are not easily understood by an industry that now
> makes plenty of money and has no incentive to change - so getting a
> mortgage
> on a "earth house" for example is difficult.
> 3). Home Insurance industry - same challenges as the Mortgage industry.
>
> For these reasons it has been more difficult to develop coho - this results
> in mostly - "only people with money" having access to coho.
>
> Changing municipality regulations and the home mortgage and home insurance
> industry is too big a challenge for any one person to take on.
>
> In my experience - the only way to have lower cost housing of any type is
> to
> move to a location that cost less to live.  Not everyone wants to live in
> Oklahoma.
>
>  Ty
>
>
> -----
>
>
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