Cohousing-L Mailing List: dues and other expenses

[Melanie Mindlin (sassetta]

Sharon’s statement is obviously true if you are a condominium and the whole 
group pays for the maintenance and utilities of the individual units. However, 
if you are a townhouse, like we are here at Ashland Cohousing, everyone has to 
maintain their own home and pay their own utilities. The HOA dues only cover 
the common facilities.

As she says, there is no basis for believing that smaller units use common 
facilities less than larger units. We have generally found the opposite to be 
true since they tend to have more need for additional space to do things, host 
guests, etc. We have all paid equally to the community dues since inception and 
nobody has felt this was unfair.  

We have two “affordable units” that are equity restricted and they do not pay 
the main HOA dues at all, so we all continually subsidize them. To keep this 
aspect of shared costs fair, we separated out items from the HOA dues that 
relate only to our “social” activities, and the affordable units pay a share of 
this. These are things like childcare for meetings, trainings, and parties. 
This part is based partly on number of people in the household. However this 
variable amount is very small—only about 15% of the dues.

Melanie



> On Mar 5, 2025, at 3:16 AM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote:
> 
>> Denise Tennen <denisetennen [at] gmail.com <mailto:denisetennen [at] 
>> gmail.com>>
>> is the author of the message below.  
> 
>> Our units range in size from under 400 sf to approx 1600 sf. 
>> Our dues are charged 25% per household and 75% on square feet
>> 
>> The smaller units end up paying the most per square foot but the
>> optics are that they pay approximately half of what the larger units
>> pay and so this leads some in the larger units to feel like they are
>> subsidizing the smaller units
> 
> But the small units at 400 SF are 1/4 the size of the larger units at 1600 
> SF, so small units should pay 3/4 less.