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Additional resources - Writings by Jim Leach
Cohousing and Economic IntegrationBy Jim Leach – January 25, 2009
Groups planning their future cohousing neighborhoods have traditionally sought diversity among their membership and future neighbors. Founding members are typically socially progressive and proactive about the role that diversity can play in creating a richer community experience and a better world. However, in few cases have cohousing communities achieved substantial racial and ethnic diversity. What they have in most cases done is achieve much greater economic diversity then is found in other new residential neighborhoods.
Cohousing attracts proactive individuals, some who have substantial financial resources and others that can barely qualify to purchase a home and have limited income. The value of an individual or family's contribution to the quality of the neighborhood has very little relationship to their income or financial capability. In many cases the most valuable community members that contribute the most to the welfare of the neighborhood have the lowest incomes. In cohousing communities lower incomes are often due to career and lifestyle choices that are not related to their capabilities as community members.
Because cohousing has to date been such a small and little understood segment of the American housing market, communities, in order to grow their membership, have sought to be as economically inclusive as possible within a home ownership model. This has lead to wide variances in size and prices of homes in the cohousing neighborhood. In early projects, where there was no affordable housing either subsidized or required, the price variances were usually well over 200%,where the higher priced homes were over 200% of the lowest price ones. Many cohousing communities help their capable lower income members and will assist them in getting into the neighborhood in creative ways ranging from renting portions of homes to outright economic assistance in purchasing.
In the past five years Wonderland in collaboration with the City of Boulder Housing Authority has completed cohousing projects that have intentionally included a high percentage of permanently affordable housing units. These communities have very large price variances between the affordable units and the market rate units. In the Wild Sage community the affordable units were priced at $80,000 to $200,000 and the market rate units were from $ 275,000 to $450,000. At the Silver Sage seniors community the range was from $125,000 to $750,000. This extreme economic diversity has caused few problems to date, and in general has added to the richness and quality of life for all community members.
Cohousing communities almost universally seek an equitable sharing of their neighborhood operating costs they tend to be relatively equalitarian and also try to minimize the common shared costs to the benefit of all. Self management and creative approaches to maintenance and other costs together with a reliance on a substantial amount of volunteered effort on t he part of neighbors' keeps most HOA monthly dues within the reasonable reach of even the lowest income community members.
The Holiday Neighborhood in North Boulder where Wild Sage and Silver Sage are located is a New Urban mixed use and mixed income development of which 40% of the homes are deed restricted and affordable to lower income residents. Residents of the affordable homes at both Wild Sage and Silver Sage have assumed neighborhood leadership roles, contributing significantly to both cohousing community's welfare and to that of the larger neighborhood. A Wild Sage affordable housing resident runs the Holiday Eco Pass bus ridership program, and several of the Silver Sage affordable residents are very involved in local and national democratic activism.
The cohousing movement has generated a great deal of expertise in good community building and decision making process. This is important in building relationships and capitalizing on the diversity in a neighborhood. The cohousing common houses are frequently used for meetings and events that serve the larger neighborhood. All of this is proof that a mixed income cohousing community provides lower income residents with social support and security that enables them to contribute greatly to the social capital of their neighborhood.
