Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: making cohousing affordable

[R Philip Dowds (rphilipdowds]

As usual, I’ll offer a contrarian response:

I do agree that Balkanized land use control, where each county or city or town 
devises development rules favoring tax revenue generators (namely, commercial, 
or maybe luxury retirement villages and MacMansions on 5-acre lots) but 
discouraging revenue- and service-demanding occupancies (namely, family 
housing) is a big part of the problem.  I will also agree that the finance and 
insurance industries are often risk-averse (although when you recall the 
savings and loan fiasco, the Enron bankruptcy, the collateralized debt 
obligation catastrophe, the Bernie Madoff boondoggle and the FTX implosion, you 
do have to wonder if our conservatives spend most of their time asleep at the 
wheel.)

Nonetheless, I will assert the real problem is a grossly unequal distribution 
of wealth and income.  The USA is now, by a significant margin, the most 
unequal economy in the modern world.  This inequality distorts the entire 
housing market, such that most developers and investors chase profits in the 
highest of high-end projects, which then bid out and drain off much or most of 
the available labor and material.  Few professionals are interested in the hard 
work and limited reward of building “ordinary” housing for “ordinary” families.

If I’m right about this (and I think I am), then pecking away at the edges with 
modular bathrooms and tax credits is not going to solve our American housing 
problem.  The only solution that will have impact — as it did splendidly (and 
also tragically) in the housing boom of 50s and 60s — is a prosperous society 
based on greater equality.

———————————
Thanks,
Philip Dowds
Cornerstone Cohousing
Cambridge, MA

> On Jan 27, 2025, at 1:54 PM, Sophie Rubin <yophiest [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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:
>> 
>> 
>> 
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> http://L.cohousing.org/info
> 
> 
>