Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: dues and other expenses

[R Philip Dowds (rphilipdowds]

Our Cornerstone experience has been that we’re always pretty confident about 
who is living where — and it seems most people are pretty candid about when a 
daughter leaves for college, or when they’re taking a roommate.  At ±55 adults, 
most people can keep track of most names and faces.  We set the water 
proportion at the start of a fiscal year — but if there’s an unexpected change 
mid-year, we do not recalculate.

More interesting for us is, Who’s a “member” (and thus eligible to object in a 
plenary consent)?  Our working definition is that a member is an owner with 
name on the deed at Registry … but we rarely check on what the deed says.  What 
about a long-term spouse who for some reason isn’t actually on the deed as 
co-owner?  What about a unit that lists multiple non-residents, or a trust, as 
co-owners?  We’ve partially solved this problem by doing all consents by 
individual, but any votes (if necessary) by unit.

We once had a case where the adult owners de-camped to their country of origin, 
but retained ownership of the unit — and allowed their non-owner college kids 
to live in it for a couple of years.  Neither the absentee owners nor the 
resident students sought to participate in community affairs.

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

> On Mar 5, 2025, at 12:07 PM, Sharon Villines <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com> 
> wrote:
> 
> I’ve always wondered how you keep track of how many people are living in a 
> unit. For years I kept track of the quorum for meetings and there were times 
> when it was touchey. Was that person living here or not? One quorum is based 
> on the number of owners — who owns that unit? Is the unit that had a divorce 
> this year still owned by 2 people or one.