Hello Beautiful Inspiring Busy people!
Its been quite a while since one of these things, and I just wanted to try to piece together a little perspective by talking about what different folks on the recieving end of this list are up to (no names though, feel free to reveal yourself, its not my place!), and what I've been looking into, thinking about and doing related to this "project".
First of all,
I'd like to plug this book that Sara brought up "Creating A Life Together" by Diane Leafe Christian. Silly name, as it so happens with so many good books, but definitely the most appropriate, inspired and well researched book that could possibly be for projects such as this. Christian lives at Earthaven in NC and has so much to say about various Villages processes of forming, the legal aspects to think about when buying and owning land, tax stuff, Profit/non Profit, how to think about membership, and so much more. I will refer to this book many times!
I'd also like to suggest that anyone thinking about spending anytime in a co-housing/or eco-village setting read this book however you can.
I was thinking that we could do a foto-copy and mailing swap---
I could mail different chapters to different folks, and each could then mail that chapter they have to other folks, so that way we could spread the cost around, and it could also be a little fun :-) Does that make sense?
Second off, I am so inspired and often jealous of what so many folks i know are up to. I often have to pinch myself to realize that my friends and acquaintences are up to so many cool things.
As for folks that have expressed direct or collaborative interest in the project, here are some stats:
(Please forgive me in advance if i skip you, so much cool stuff is going on, and my mind isn't getting sharper unfortunately!-- let me know if i should add anything to the list please! - and please don't view my contribution of your activity as binding, i just want to emphasize the collective growth wealth around us as a community)
-2 folks in Second year of Law School, with totally awesome ambitions that exceed my comprehension
-A good friend entering 3rd year of Med school.
-A foundational friend owning a house for possible equity in the project and entering Nursing school (if i understand correctly, because Nurses are recognized as one of the best professions to work almost anywhere in the country-- the Farm in TN mentions this in their history. ) All the while, also raising chickens and gardening!
-Several friends in various grad schools in various subjects pursuing their passions, three just graduated in Fine Arts (with grant now!) and one in Media.
-Others now studying for social work and PhDs in agriculture and environmental studies
-A foundational friend running a farm in PA
-A possible foundational friend working on his career as a Children's book writer/illustrator and working on his farm skills in Oregon for the Summer
-A couple amazing friends working for some time now as landscape designers/architects
-A collaborative friend continuing his serious study of Farm life with his partner in CA
-a great friend overcoming the temporal constraints of the Justice system, wowing us and sharing his great insights and charisma with us all
-a good friend busting ass and accomplishing great things related to fish and boats in Alaska to realize his dream for a Naturally Built music studio and more? !
-and knowledge of friends and folks building houses for themselves and others in Texas and Maine.
- and so many much more cool stuff happening!
feel free to post about interesting related things!
In my little world, I am approaching my first anniversary of life as a construction worker. I've been extraordinarily blessed to have lived and worked some with Sunray Kelley in WA, Haikola Custom Construction in ATX, and Kindra's Claysandstraw.com with her awesome partner John near Blanco, TX in the past year in what really has been the most challenging occupation I've yet imagined. In addition, I was able to sublet the first permitted Strawbale/Art house (built by Norm and Cat B) in Austin for 3 months last summer, which was a wonderful education and contrast to living in Sunray's works.
Currently, with Kindra and Co. we are coming to completion on a strawbale house for an awesome recently retired client, with a possible Cob house starting in September.
Apart from "Creating a life Together", I've been in the reading of : bell hooks "Beloning: the Culture of Place" which is a wonderful and deep meditation on her life and coming back to her native Kentucky to teach at Berea, the deep place of agriculture with african-american culture, and many other things.
I just finished Witold Rybscynski's "Home", which is a lovely eurocentric history of comfort and the conception of home within western society.
Also read Pollan's "A Place of My Own", an overlooked gem in my opinion refering to interesting construction and architectural history.
Still working on "The Poetics of Space" - let me know if you have any insights from reading it to spur me along!
Also working on "Cohousing" by Chris ScottHanson. A good book, but not essential.
Finally, I've also dived head first into finances initially via a random "motivational conference" my old boss invited the crew to. The speakers included Colin Powell and Rudy Guiliani. Quite a random spectacle! Through the rabbit hole and the experiment of un-demonizing money, I've been studying with an uncommon zeal "the markets", investment and related things in this funny economic political year that we find ourselves in. My only complaint is that i find it a little too fascinating for an often described anarchist....
Thirdly,
reading Christians book (which i still haven't finished its so concisely packed full of information!), has created a very necessary mental rubric about the order of priorities for a village-like endeavor.
Those that i would most like to share with y'all are:
-The necessity for an original core group, however small, and a secondary group of supporters, and also, of course, late-comers.
-The necessity for the coregroup to develop a "Vision statement" and "Vision Document" as a group as something to refer to for the future, as a community exercise and as a creation of a sort of dialog that can be a tool for future communication.
-The need for more advanced knowledge of relevant Tax, Legal, and Investment information in order to better and more smoothly interact with those worlds; as well as the definite need to occaisionally hire accountants and attourneys and other sorts of professional managers (Christian also suggests a Consensus Instructor or Mediator for some of the initial important meetings).
-The need to have an well structured relationship and understanding of loans, and mortgages. Several villages have developed a legal way of forming their own bank, and some also to issue their own internal currency as a way to organize their finances, loans, and internal economy. Fascinating! The "Schumacher Society" is often mentioned as a catalyst for this, but i have yet to understand or find their website to be helpful to me, Christian's book is a great start though!
I think that's all i can bite off for now.
People coming together--- ideas looking for seeds and soil; strawbales, some mud and sympathetic trees...
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
NYT article on cohousing...
((( a multi generational cohousing focused on the arts...sounds great! :-) )))
you Might have to register (for free) with NYT to read the article on their site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/garden/11cohousing.html?pagewanted=2&_r=5&hp
A BETTER WAY? Touring Temescal Creek cohousing in Oakland.
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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy CHRIS COLIN
Published: June 10, 2009
VICKI SETZER and her cats inhabit a small ranch home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Visalia, Calif. Connie Baechler leases a split-level house in Smyrna, Ga., with her fiancé. Perfectly typical nesting arrangements, and yet something profound seemed to be missing.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Times Topics: Sustainable Living | Housing
Enlarge This Image
Drew Kelly for The New York Times
DAILY SHARING Participants on a California tour looked at Temescal Creek cohousing in Oakland.
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So on a Saturday morning in the East Bay area of California, they and about 17 others boarded a rumbling white tour bus to try to find a mode of living better suited to the times.
The tour was one of several this season in different parts of the country designed to give participants an up-close look at various co-housing communities, and to address an increasingly common feeling that one pays too much for one’s home, sees friends too little there and generally lives a more isolated life than is desirable. These are not new complaints, but the recession has sharpened them, as it has thrown all large expenditures under deeper scrutiny.
Remedial questions are permitted on these tours, like, “What is co-housing?”
The Cohousing Association of the United States has been answering that question quite frequently as more people sign up for its tours: The communities consist of individual houses whose residents share some common space, a few communal dinners a week and a commitment to green living.
The movement has been gaining momentum here since it first arrived from Denmark two decades ago. But passengers on the bus tours describe the general climate of uncertainty as setting off more urgent waves of reappraisal: Is this how I want to raise my family? Spend my remaining years? Is there a better option — a more stable community?
Judy Pope, a consultant in Oakland, Calif., who joined the East Bay tour, described a practical interest in co-housing.
“I had a pretty robust portfolio of investments that I was going to retire on,” Ms. Pope said. “Now I’m feeling the financial pressure to live with people. I can’t continue to live in my big old house.”
In some cases, the closeness of these communities offers bulwarks against a lousy economy. Residents speak of lending money to one another when necessary or, say, pitching in to build a wheelchair ramp when insurance might not cover it. Then there is the savings associated with a more efficiently designed home, and shared upkeep costs. But strictly speaking, a home in a co-housing community doesn’t necessarily cost less than a traditional home. As advocates describe it, the benefits are of the added-value variety.
“You just get more bang for your buck,” said Laura Fitch, a 15-year co-houser who led a recent tour in Massachusetts. “You can have entertainment next door rather than going to the movies, and if you’re a parent, you don’t have to drive to all those play dates, or even buy as many toys because your kids are more entertained.”
She added that the price of co-housing often included a common house with guest rooms, a party space, a children’s play area and the security of people watching out for one another.
Jason Reichert, who works at a shipyard in Maine and joined a New England tour, said he liked the idea of weathering the country’s economic and environmental crises with a group.
“My grandparents’ community got through the Depression by being very close-knit,” Mr. Reichert said, “with one family knowing how to farm, for example, and another knowing how to raise poultry. We’ve lost that. But co-housing is accomplishing something similar.”
Craig Ragland, the executive director of the Cohousing Association, said: “Some people are looking at these communities as a lifeboat. The thinking is, if I’m surrounded by people who care about me, I’m less likely to crash and burn.”
More than 115 rural, urban and suburban co-housing communities exist across the country, consisting of 2,675 units, according to the association. There are 3 to 67 homes in each, on tiny city lots and 550-acre parcels. Some are “retrofit” communities, in which existing side-by-side homes are purchased and then converted. Others start with a piece of land and build units from scratch. In both, residents own their homes outright, but agree to participate in the communal arrangement.
The Cohousing Association has sponsored these tours for about a decade. For $105, participants get a box lunch, an enthusiastic guide or two and an eight-hour tour of various communities.
To Your Left, a Better Way of Life?
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comments (54)
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LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkPublished: June 10, 2009
(Page 2 of 2)
The recent East Bay trip was led by Jennifer West and Neil Planchon, both residents of local co-housing communities. The people who convened that Saturday lived alone or with families, ranged from 30-something to 60-something and came from Colorado and Vancouver, Georgia and California.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Drew Kelly for The New York Times
Children playing in a communal yard at Doyle Street in Emeryville.
Related
Times Topics: Sustainable Living | Housing
Enlarge This Image
Rick Friedman for The New York Times
In Massachusetts, members of a tour group had lunch together at Mosaic Commons in Berlin.
Enlarge This Image
Rick Friedman for The New York Times
Julia Negele gardened at Jamaica Plain in Boston.
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
Read All Comments (54) »
As rolling adventures go, the trip had the esprit de corps of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus and the hands-in-laps manners of a sightseeing tour. Between stops, passengers talked about how they ended up on this atypical excursion.
Ms. Baechler from Georgia presented a familiar gripe. “I like my neighbors back home, but we don’t really have a community that gets together and talks,” she said. “So I end up driving 20 miles to have dinner with a friend after work.”
She added: “I guess there’s always Facebook, but I want to be sitting next to a three-dimensional person. With co-housing, we’d be able to converge just yards from where we live.”
Paul Hadley, 35, is a freelance French-horn player and stay-at-home dad in Santa Rosa, Calif. He and his wife, Judy, a chemical engineer, live with their 2-year-old in a three-bedroom house on a country road that has become a busy thoroughfare. Co-housing, Mr. Hadley said, seemed to offer a return to village life, without all the cars. He and his wife were seeking “a richer life of relationships, not stuff,” he said.
The bus steamed along, periodically disgorging passengers to stumble through people’s happy homes. Parents on the tour watched as children ran from unit to unit, no supervision required. Devotees of sustainability listened to tales of shared resources and reduced footprints. Those keen on intergenerational living saw residents of all ages mingling casually. For the design conscious, there was an intelligent flow that encouraged serendipitous meetings while still preserving privacy.
“For a long time we’d always be referred to as ‘communes for the ’90s’ or ‘the new commune,’ ” said Mr. Ragland of the Cohousing Association. “But increasingly people are seeing that it’s really just a new type of neighborhood.”
Karen Hester, who lives in the Temescal Creek community, the fifth stop of the day, answered questions about daily life in co-housing. “It’s not about utopia,” she said. “It’s fundamentally a pragmatic thing. When my computer crashes, my neighbor is over in five minutes to fix it. In turn, maybe his kids come home from school sick and I’m there to take care of them.”
The tour put the group in a kind of envy daze. At Temescal Commons, originally formed by members of a nearby Methodist church, photovoltaic roof panels let the residents sell power back to the utility company. At Pleasant Hill, children sold lemonade in a bright patch of shared grass.
But Ms. West and Mr. Planchon were clear that co-housing presented challenges, too. Ms. West recounted a heated episode at her community where someone didn’t receive a party invitation. They also spoke of meeting fatigue, a byproduct of reaching decisions via consensus model, and the surprisingly volatile matter of pets.
Do the tours win people over? Some, like Ms. Baechler, came away with reservations — she thought she might hold out for a community focused on the arts. But mostly the groups leave ecstatic, fingers nearly on checkbooks.
Delina Malo-Juvera, 36, lives in a 19th-century farmhouse in rural Maine. After the Massachusetts tour, she said she hoped to one day start a co-housing group of her own. “The economy and the state of the world — you don’t know what’s going to happen, so it’d be great to have that secure, self-sustaining community,” she said. “I loved it.”
For her part, Ms. Setzer, the cul-de-sac dweller from Visalia, said that the idea of joining a multigenerational community might be the most appealing aspect — and that she didn’t mind how few people were aware of the existence of this vaguely Norman Rockwellian lifestyle.
“I told my son about co-housing, and he thought I was a Martian,” Ms. Setzer said. “Then again, he often thinks that.”
you Might have to register (for free) with NYT to read the article on their site.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/garden/11cohousing.html?pagewanted=2&_r=5&hp
A BETTER WAY? Touring Temescal Creek cohousing in Oakland.
Sign in to Recommend
comments (54)
Send To Phone
Single Page
Reprints
ShareClose
LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy CHRIS COLIN
Published: June 10, 2009
VICKI SETZER and her cats inhabit a small ranch home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Visalia, Calif. Connie Baechler leases a split-level house in Smyrna, Ga., with her fiancé. Perfectly typical nesting arrangements, and yet something profound seemed to be missing.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Times Topics: Sustainable Living | Housing
Enlarge This Image
Drew Kelly for The New York Times
DAILY SHARING Participants on a California tour looked at Temescal Creek cohousing in Oakland.
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
Read All Comments (54) »
So on a Saturday morning in the East Bay area of California, they and about 17 others boarded a rumbling white tour bus to try to find a mode of living better suited to the times.
The tour was one of several this season in different parts of the country designed to give participants an up-close look at various co-housing communities, and to address an increasingly common feeling that one pays too much for one’s home, sees friends too little there and generally lives a more isolated life than is desirable. These are not new complaints, but the recession has sharpened them, as it has thrown all large expenditures under deeper scrutiny.
Remedial questions are permitted on these tours, like, “What is co-housing?”
The Cohousing Association of the United States has been answering that question quite frequently as more people sign up for its tours: The communities consist of individual houses whose residents share some common space, a few communal dinners a week and a commitment to green living.
The movement has been gaining momentum here since it first arrived from Denmark two decades ago. But passengers on the bus tours describe the general climate of uncertainty as setting off more urgent waves of reappraisal: Is this how I want to raise my family? Spend my remaining years? Is there a better option — a more stable community?
Judy Pope, a consultant in Oakland, Calif., who joined the East Bay tour, described a practical interest in co-housing.
“I had a pretty robust portfolio of investments that I was going to retire on,” Ms. Pope said. “Now I’m feeling the financial pressure to live with people. I can’t continue to live in my big old house.”
In some cases, the closeness of these communities offers bulwarks against a lousy economy. Residents speak of lending money to one another when necessary or, say, pitching in to build a wheelchair ramp when insurance might not cover it. Then there is the savings associated with a more efficiently designed home, and shared upkeep costs. But strictly speaking, a home in a co-housing community doesn’t necessarily cost less than a traditional home. As advocates describe it, the benefits are of the added-value variety.
“You just get more bang for your buck,” said Laura Fitch, a 15-year co-houser who led a recent tour in Massachusetts. “You can have entertainment next door rather than going to the movies, and if you’re a parent, you don’t have to drive to all those play dates, or even buy as many toys because your kids are more entertained.”
She added that the price of co-housing often included a common house with guest rooms, a party space, a children’s play area and the security of people watching out for one another.
Jason Reichert, who works at a shipyard in Maine and joined a New England tour, said he liked the idea of weathering the country’s economic and environmental crises with a group.
“My grandparents’ community got through the Depression by being very close-knit,” Mr. Reichert said, “with one family knowing how to farm, for example, and another knowing how to raise poultry. We’ve lost that. But co-housing is accomplishing something similar.”
Craig Ragland, the executive director of the Cohousing Association, said: “Some people are looking at these communities as a lifeboat. The thinking is, if I’m surrounded by people who care about me, I’m less likely to crash and burn.”
More than 115 rural, urban and suburban co-housing communities exist across the country, consisting of 2,675 units, according to the association. There are 3 to 67 homes in each, on tiny city lots and 550-acre parcels. Some are “retrofit” communities, in which existing side-by-side homes are purchased and then converted. Others start with a piece of land and build units from scratch. In both, residents own their homes outright, but agree to participate in the communal arrangement.
The Cohousing Association has sponsored these tours for about a decade. For $105, participants get a box lunch, an enthusiastic guide or two and an eight-hour tour of various communities.
To Your Left, a Better Way of Life?
Sign in to Recommend
comments (54)
Send To Phone
Single Page
Reprints
ShareClose
LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkPublished: June 10, 2009
(Page 2 of 2)
The recent East Bay trip was led by Jennifer West and Neil Planchon, both residents of local co-housing communities. The people who convened that Saturday lived alone or with families, ranged from 30-something to 60-something and came from Colorado and Vancouver, Georgia and California.
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Drew Kelly for The New York Times
Children playing in a communal yard at Doyle Street in Emeryville.
Related
Times Topics: Sustainable Living | Housing
Enlarge This Image
Rick Friedman for The New York Times
In Massachusetts, members of a tour group had lunch together at Mosaic Commons in Berlin.
Enlarge This Image
Rick Friedman for The New York Times
Julia Negele gardened at Jamaica Plain in Boston.
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
Read All Comments (54) »
As rolling adventures go, the trip had the esprit de corps of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus and the hands-in-laps manners of a sightseeing tour. Between stops, passengers talked about how they ended up on this atypical excursion.
Ms. Baechler from Georgia presented a familiar gripe. “I like my neighbors back home, but we don’t really have a community that gets together and talks,” she said. “So I end up driving 20 miles to have dinner with a friend after work.”
She added: “I guess there’s always Facebook, but I want to be sitting next to a three-dimensional person. With co-housing, we’d be able to converge just yards from where we live.”
Paul Hadley, 35, is a freelance French-horn player and stay-at-home dad in Santa Rosa, Calif. He and his wife, Judy, a chemical engineer, live with their 2-year-old in a three-bedroom house on a country road that has become a busy thoroughfare. Co-housing, Mr. Hadley said, seemed to offer a return to village life, without all the cars. He and his wife were seeking “a richer life of relationships, not stuff,” he said.
The bus steamed along, periodically disgorging passengers to stumble through people’s happy homes. Parents on the tour watched as children ran from unit to unit, no supervision required. Devotees of sustainability listened to tales of shared resources and reduced footprints. Those keen on intergenerational living saw residents of all ages mingling casually. For the design conscious, there was an intelligent flow that encouraged serendipitous meetings while still preserving privacy.
“For a long time we’d always be referred to as ‘communes for the ’90s’ or ‘the new commune,’ ” said Mr. Ragland of the Cohousing Association. “But increasingly people are seeing that it’s really just a new type of neighborhood.”
Karen Hester, who lives in the Temescal Creek community, the fifth stop of the day, answered questions about daily life in co-housing. “It’s not about utopia,” she said. “It’s fundamentally a pragmatic thing. When my computer crashes, my neighbor is over in five minutes to fix it. In turn, maybe his kids come home from school sick and I’m there to take care of them.”
The tour put the group in a kind of envy daze. At Temescal Commons, originally formed by members of a nearby Methodist church, photovoltaic roof panels let the residents sell power back to the utility company. At Pleasant Hill, children sold lemonade in a bright patch of shared grass.
But Ms. West and Mr. Planchon were clear that co-housing presented challenges, too. Ms. West recounted a heated episode at her community where someone didn’t receive a party invitation. They also spoke of meeting fatigue, a byproduct of reaching decisions via consensus model, and the surprisingly volatile matter of pets.
Do the tours win people over? Some, like Ms. Baechler, came away with reservations — she thought she might hold out for a community focused on the arts. But mostly the groups leave ecstatic, fingers nearly on checkbooks.
Delina Malo-Juvera, 36, lives in a 19th-century farmhouse in rural Maine. After the Massachusetts tour, she said she hoped to one day start a co-housing group of her own. “The economy and the state of the world — you don’t know what’s going to happen, so it’d be great to have that secure, self-sustaining community,” she said. “I loved it.”
For her part, Ms. Setzer, the cul-de-sac dweller from Visalia, said that the idea of joining a multigenerational community might be the most appealing aspect — and that she didn’t mind how few people were aware of the existence of this vaguely Norman Rockwellian lifestyle.
“I told my son about co-housing, and he thought I was a Martian,” Ms. Setzer said. “Then again, he often thinks that.”