Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: making cohousing affordable

[Sophie Rubin (yophiest]

I just responded to second Ty’s response before seeing Hafidha’s response
below, which is also excellent!!

On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 07:34 Hafidha Sofia <hafidhaao [at] gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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:
>
>
>