Cohousing Tour
The End of Posts that Begin with ‘G’
This is an interesting article about tours of cohousing in Oakland, California. This has been on my mind a lot since thinking about community gardening as it relates to urban planning. Since the entire point of urban agriculture, for me, is about decentralizing the production and distribution of food for urban areas, cohousing always comes to mind as an ideal partner to this approach. My problem with it, though, is the same problems I have with housing associations. I’m just not into obligating behavior. The article mentions some of the challenges of cohousing, like meeting fatigue caused by a consensus decision-making process. I can imagine a host of other problems as well and some of them may well be unavoidable but for my money, I tend to lean toward solutions that put the inconveniences at the beginning and end of the arrangement rather than throughout it. If the hard choices are placed on getting in and getting out of the cohousing arrangement, along with plenty of significant rewards for cohousing participation throughout, that should be enough to motivate acceptable levels of participation without any arbitrary quotas.
Nevertheless, more cohousing experiments are better than none. More power to all of them.