Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Graduating to Cohousing on Steroids

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

I’ve been waiting to respond to Sophie’s thoughtful message until I had time to 
do it justice. I hope I can respond in the same way. I’ve quoted much of her 
original text so it is clear what I’m responding to.

> On Jun 12, 2025, at 4:00 PM, Sophie Rubin <yophiest [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> It’s such a beautiful dream and the model (“life plan community”) is
> widespread but doesn’t exist beyond senior living because of the wealth
> required to pay for the workshare done by employees, even at scale; see
> note (1). At its core, your life is easier now than when you lived in
> cohousing because you are paying for it to be so. Workshare “not working”
> in cohousing isn’t a matter of scale. It’s a matter of wealth.

Interestingly, the way I determined whether I coudl afford to move to Riderwood 
was to compare what I spent monthly and yearly living in cohousing and what I 
would be required to spend at Riderwood. The monthly fees at Riderwood are high 
and they are also required. One meal a day is included but if I don’t eat it, I 
still have to pay for it. Practically everything is included in this fee so it 
is not possible to pay less by doing without. That made me very nervous. 

In fact, it is costing the same. 

I sold my unit to pay for the large initial deposit and the monthly fee is 
covered by my Social Security payments. Medical expenses, clothing, computer 
stuff, books, etc come out of my IRA. That I can budget or forego. I have 
comprehensive health insurance because I worked for SUNY for 25 years.

In addition Riderwood, like other 501c3 communities, has never excluded a 
resident who later finds that their funds are depleted. A major focus of the 
residents is making contributions to the Benevolent Fund which is maintained in 
part to cover these expenses.

> Seniors have an average net worth NINE TIMES that of the average
> 30-year-old American.

There is a wonderful book called the "Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on 
weather, greed, and happiness" by Morgan Housel. It’s very different from “how 
to get rich” books. It explains how life and money work. What capitalism is.  
One thing he explains is that people like Warren Buffett did not get rich until 
they were well into adulthood. That older people have more money than 30 year 
olds is a function of time — it takes time to accumulate money. To benefit from 
years of labor by finally having access to savings in IRAs. 

One of the things I became very concerned about at year 15 in cohousing was the 
question of generativity — what is cohousing doing about the next generation. 
It’s own elderhood? How is it ensuring that the initial values are maintained 
when the community becomes stable financially and cohousing is an attractive 
way to live? There is the reserve fund, if well done, but what about the 
initial values? The values that the now older people held that enabled them to 
build cohousing in the first place? (This is a long discussion for another day.)

> And the Riderwood model with paid staff only works
> when every. single. person. in the community contributes significant money
> (hence the monthly service fee *per person*). The model stops working once
> you try to spread the wealth; see note (2).

Cohousing also only works when every single household has the money to buy a 
unit, pays their monthly fees, and works to maintain the property and the 
social support system.

My question is whether cohousing would benefit from a larger scale. A leap to 
building a 400 unit cohousing complex would require a different level of 
financing and construction but could that be accomplished and allow housing for 
all generations?

In adult communities, people are required to have a level of income that can 
sustain them for their predictable llfetime. In cohousing that job is done by 
the mortgage companies. Banks determne by loaning money for construction and 
for individual mortgages whether this real estate development and these people 
with these incomes can successfully pay the money back, with interest.

> Put another way: the supply and demand lines cross at the product that is
> cohousing, and they cross at the product that is life plan community, but
> at least so far, they don’t cross anywhere in between, because there isn’t
> a product that can provide enough of both (a) what people in a given market
> want and can afford (demand), and (b) what can be reasonably built and
> maintained for that price (supply).

I thiink there could be. Villages and fishing communities everwhere have 
succeeded in doing this for eons. I don’t think we have looked at this 
carefully enough to realize it or have been taught the values that maintained 
these communities for thousands of years. "The Dawn of Everything: A new 
history of Humanity” by David Graeber and David Wengrow is an example of 
looking at history a different way. Other anthropologists are also doing this 
kind of research. When social scientists looked at the remains of communities 
that had no discernable hierarchy or ruling class, they were determined to be 
“transitional” — nothing clear happening here. But those communities of 
thoussands of people lasted for hundreds or years. Something was happening. A 
study in Central America looked at the differences between communities that 
lasted for hundreds of years and those that lasted a few decades. The 
determining factor was the investment in infrastructure. The valuing and 
development of the real estate determined how long a community could last. 

I was stunned to learn that city planning in Ancient Greece and Rome had as a 
basic principle a place for the community to gather as a whole. There had to be 
a central square or ball playing field large enough for an identified group to 
meet and discuss. How often is that considered in today’s town planning? More 
likely the government will want to avoid large areas where people could collect.

> We can certainly think about whether that product should exist, or consider
> more carefully why it doesn’t. In my view, these are sociological
> questions. Why don’t more people care more about community, to create a
> bigger market for that? Why do Americans care so much about single family
> homes, which limits new/alternative communities in a lot of ways? Why
> aren’t people willing to volunteer more of their time or money to make the
> community “shinier”? Are there ways to make markets more efficient, to do
> more for less, in terms of producing housing, creating community, and
> maintaining both? These are the things that would be required to create a
> feasible product that lies in between cohousing and life plan community.

Yes, and note that they are all social, not financial. My question is whether 
cohousing is paying enough attention to the values that foster volunteerism or 
is it another real estate "option.” Religious communities provided great 
stability to neighborhoods. When I think about the things the common house 
provides in cohousing, I think about how many of those things were provided by 
churches for generations.

In reading the volumes of handbooks, newsletters, three ring binders, and 
website information about Riderrwood, I noticed that the buildings to which the 
residential buildings are attached are called variously “club houses”, “common 
spaces”, and "common buildings.” There may be  more that I haven’t noticed yet 
but I think it probably shows a progression from thinking about Riderwood as 
“clubs” which are exclusionary, “exclusive”, or as residential communities that 
share common spaces. 

> I’m sure there are things about the way that your new community functions
> that cohousing and others could learn from, just as cohousing communities
> learn from each other, from other intentional communities, from community
> development principles, etc.
> 
> But sooo much of the ease and support and cleanliness and structure that
> you feel in your habitat is because you’re surrounded by people who are
> retired and wealthy, which means they have time and resources and
> relatively little to worry about and a lot to “give”. We would all be more
> generous and better at creating community if we had the means to live in
> these conditions.

I’m not so sure. Certainly people who are working 12-14 hours a day outside 
their home have little time to do anything else. But the reason I was able to 
retired from a full-time job, had a lot to do with realizing how much of the 
“compensation” for my time was going to paying for things to make working 
easier (like eating meals out, vacatiions to get away from it, keeping up 
appearances, etc.) and taxes. I also avoided, consciously, acquiring interests 
that were expensive like travel, theater, live music, cars, private clubs, etc. 

We all have 24 hours in a day. We choose how to spend it. Sometimes those seem 
like forced choices but are they?

> (1) The cost to live at Riderwood:
> 
> Entry fee for a 2-bedroom, 1 bath (the minimum most *families* could
> accept as “livable”):   $330,000-440,000

One of the issues is the amount of space we consider livable. This is a huge 
amount of SF compared to other countries, even to communities within the US. My 
grandmother raised 6 children in a 2 bedroom house without a bathroom. As some 
children grew up and left others married and brought home spouses. For 60 
years, with people bouncing back home for various reasons, that house supported 
the lives of 6 people.
> 
> Monthly payment for one person: $3300-$3500
> 
> Monthly payment for each additional person: $1200

Payments per person depend on the size of the space reserved and reflect 
maintenance and property costs. As a single person, I find the $1200 number for 
an additional person to be discriminatory and a left over from assuming 
one-income households and giving preference to men who were supporting families 
(unlike women who were also supporting families).

> And that’s already at your proposed scale of 3000 people! (And that is the
> reason for their large size - life plan communities almost never work
> financially at the scale of 40 households.)

One of my tasks is to look at the numbers. Riderwood started with one common 
house and 4 residential buildings. Now it is the largest life plan community in 
the US, probably the world.

> As someone who develops residential property at a commercial scale
> (nonprofit), I can tell you it doesn’t get cheaper to build more than 3000
> units. A lot of “Riderwoods” are built by nonprofits with missions - if
> they could do the same thing for cheaper, they would!

Riderwood is also a nonprofit. The founder built his first community on an 
abandoned college campus. He looked around and said there is everything here 
for a community. And began finding investors who would contribute money to 
develop one. It took him about 10 years.

> (2) If it wasn’t age restricted, could you also pay for your kids to live
> with you in this community, if they continue to work and actively bring
> in/contribute their current assets and incomes? If the answer is no (and it
> is for almost everyone - as the total down payment for 2 small units would
> be about $800k), then “spreading the wealth” doesn't work because there
> literally isn't enough wealth to spread... unless you have some
> extraordinarily rich and generous people willing to cover others' costs.
> Because those people don’t exist, everyone who lives there has to bring
> significant wealth to pay for the facilities maintenance and staff.

As above, the wealth people have is a function more of how long they have lived 
to accumulate the wealth rather than having been born wealthy. As a person who 
grew up below the poverty line, there is also an infusion of wealth when 
parents die. At about the age of 50-something, I had a rush of feeling poor 
again when my friends and colleagues began inheriting houses in the country or 
on the beach and tons of furniture from parent who were dying or downsizing. My 
family had nothing to leave.

> A little more about how a developer thinks about the “market”:
> 
> With two adults and one child, a family’s *monthly* payment for a
> 2-bedroom, 1-bath unit at Riderwood would be $5,700. While that rent is
> technically considered affordable to a family who makes about $200,000/year
> (which is twice your area median), it is about 3x the rent for the same
> unit at market price (about $1,900). And that’s not even accounting for the
> $400,000 the family would need to have on hand to get in the door.

This is why the issue is larger than cohousing vs senior housing. Somehow we 
have to figure this out. What works for different age groups? And how do we 
move to some economic system of guaranteed minimum income?

> If you provide waaaaay more amenities and services and community than a
> normal apartment, but the same physical space for the private unit, are
> there enough people who want that and can pay 3x the current market price?
> No. Selling cohousing at its current price on the basis of the amenities
> and community you receive in addition to your property doesn’t work for
> 99.9% of young families. It's often already largely because of cost, but
> other considerations, like more freedom and more space, are valued more
> highly than community when deciding where/how to live, even among families
> who could pay for cohousing if they wanted it.

The problem is how we build housing — prohibitive zoning is a major problem. 
Senior communities are designed intentionally for people over the ages of 
55-62. Since people are living longer, that means half of one’s adult life 
could be spent in a senior community. So many economic and social issues are 
related to the extended life span most of us have. Cohousing is a good solution 
for the first half of life but is it also too narrow to address larger social 
and economic issues?

Sharon
——
Sharon Villines
Riderwood Village, Silver Spring MD