Call-In #1: Transcript

This transcript of the Oct 25 Call-in was prepared by volunteer Liza Cobb. Coho/US connected with Liza through Cohousing-L, the invaluable listserv used by many cohousers and those interested in cohousing for an ongoing day-to-day dialog. Coho/US greatly appreciates the contribution that Liza made to the cohousing movement by preparing this transcript.

Call Transcript

[Lisa Poley]: Hi, this is Lisa Poley, and I just wanted to open, officially open, and welcome participants to our conference, and the topic today is cohousing and the current economic crisis. We have a really nice wonderful group of panelists here that are going to come and share their ideas and views and advice.

Just briefly to introduce myself. I live in Shadow Lake Village Cohousing, and I am a recent member of the Cohousing Association board, a newly joined member, and I will be moderator for this conference.

Just to get some housekeeping out of the way very, very quickly, I wanted to mention that we will be recording, hopefully, this conversation and posting it to the Cohousing Association website, so if anybody would like to listen to it later, you should be able to find it there. There’s a link on the website.

I also wanted to encourage people listening to this conversation to post questions real-time via the website, and we’ll have Craig Ragland collecting those, and hopefully interjecting some of those questions into the conversation if you guys have a follow-up question you’d like to bring forward for the panelists as we continue. We’re going to be on the call for about an hour, but I think we’re going to let ourselves go a little bit longer if that seems to be what we want to do.

Also Craig, can you go ahead and talk a little bit about the surveys, how people can give their questions on this current call and on the follow-up survey? Can you just mention a few words about that?

[Craig Ragland]: You bet. Hello everybody. If you just go to the www.cohousing.org website. Right below the “Does cohousing have to cost so much?” photo, we have two links: “Listen to our free economics crisis conversation,” which is the workshop page that I think everybody has probably seen to get on this call; and right below that is a link that says “submit real time questions here.” It will open a two-question survey and you can complete the survey. Press done, then it will appear on my screen. And I will selectively pick some of those and share them via voice with the entire conversation here.

After the call is done, we will also be posting in that same place instead of “submit real time questions here” you will be able to provide customer feedback information to us to help us do a better job the next time we do one of these. And I think that’s all. Thanks, Lisa.

[Lisa]: Thank you, Craig. Okay, basically just to kind of orient everybody, we got a long list of wonderful questions from people across the country from different cohousing communities concerned about this issue and we tried to draw some of those questions inspiration for some sort of guiding topics of conversations, and we are going to try to address people’s needs and concerns at various stages: building, forming, living in cohousing; so we’re going to start with a few questions that are oriented toward people living in cohousing. Then we’re going to move to those who are in the building phase, and are sort of at various points in that process. Then finally we’re going to talk about some of the opportunities and cautions for those people who are prospective cohousers or are in forming groups. So we’re going to kind of move in that direction over the course of the next hour or a little bit more.

And now I would really like to introduce our panelists and welcome each of you. I am so excited that you guys could come and spend this hour with us. First I’d like to welcome Jim Leach who is a developer and president of Wonderland Hill and he also lives at Silver Sage. Welcome, Jim.

[Jim Leach]: Thank you, Lisa.

[Lisa]: I have to ask you for the record: are you willing to let your voice be recorded for this conversation?

[Jim]: Yes

[Lisa]: Okay, thank you. I’m going to have to ask each of you in turn, I guess, to be by the book. Thanks for attending. And next I wanted to present Rick Mockler, who is Coho US president, and is vice-president of Cohousing Partners, and he lives at Muir Commons. Rick, welcome.

[Rick Mockler]: Thank you, Lisa, and yes, you can record me [inaudible].

[Lisa]: Okay, thank you. Thanks. Okay, next we have Bob Bruegel, who is the president of Support Financial, Inc., which has provided early-stage bridge financing to cohousing projects over the past decade. And Bob is a founding resident of Nyland Cohousing. Welcome, Bob.

[Bob Bruegel]: Hi, that’s great. You’re fine to record.

[Lisa]: Okay, thank you. And then welcome Catya Belfer-Shevett. Catya is part of Mosaic Commons Cohousing, which is completing construction in Berlin, Massachusetts and has some units for sale. She’s project manager and also served as the Coho U.S. webmaster. So welcome, Catya. Are you there? Catya might be having some trouble with getting on the line so we’ll move on.

And also luckily at the very last minute we were able to get Charles Durrett. Thank you for joining us. Most of us already know that Chuck is cofounder of the cohousing movement in the United States; and author of the famous cohousing book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach To Housing Ourselves, and more recently, Senior Cohousing; and an architect and developer. And you are now a resident of –

[Chuck Durrett}: I’m three years in Nevada City Cohousing and 12 years in Emeryville Cohousing before that.

[Lisa]: Gotcha, okay welcome. And is it okay for us to record you?

[Chuck]: Of course.

[Lisa]: Okay, great, thank you. Okay, fantastic. Jim, you had said that you would be willing to give a very brief, orienting summary of some of the broader conditions that we are facing and some of the reasons for why we decided to host this call in the first place. Would you be willing to take a couple minutes to set the stage for us before we move into the questions?

[Jim]: Sure. I wrote a little piece that I think got on the cohousing blog “The Best Of Times and Worst Of Times For Cohousing” and it’s the way I feel, and with what’s going on now, it’s not hard to identify the “worst” part -- the housing market is terrible and the economy is headed for the worst recession that probably any of us have ever seen in our lifetime and housing is right in the middle of it. The other side of the coin, I think there’s a rapidly growing awareness that we really, we need to make significant changes in the way that we live, our life style, how we consume things, the whole concept of sustainability, and cohousing addresses that issue.

My biggest concern has been – cohousing is just a very small splinter movement: it could get buried quickly in a major recession, that’s especially driven a lot by housing. You know, we’re definitely experiencing very difficult times, and our projects in California, our Cohousing Partners projects are – you know we’ve got one in Fresno that’s just finishing up, people are moving in, and several of the members aren’t able to close on their homes because the equity in their old home has disappeared on them. We’re working with that, we’re working with lenders who are refusing to close loans, they’re almost going out of business faster than the builders are. And then we’ve got new projects like in Grass Valley where we have seniors cohousing ready to go, 70 percent pre-sold, and the bank is baulking because they’re struggling.

And we’re in a state of limbo right now, I think from a finance standpoint, for anything -- cohousing and almost every other business -- that I think is going to work its way out. To a certain extent we’re already seeing some break, it looks like we’re going finally to be able to start closings in Fresno for the members. We’re having to do all kinds of creative things, and we think how we’re doing our basic financial models for cohousing…

At the same time we’re seeing a really strong interest in the concept, and I think it’s the time when those of us who really understand and support this concept need to get our act pulled together and identify what cohousing has to offer to the larger society and how can we best articulate that, because we found out, at least I have, over the past 20 years, it’s a long slow sale. People don’t just jump to cohousing. People like the idea, but to get up enough courage to actually do it takes significant movement. Often it takes people years to get to that point. I think it’s the time to discuss this … time of opportunity and extreme challenge.

[Lisa]: I think that really sums it up – this idea that it’s both challenging and there’s some tremendous opportunities. Also, what you said about the possibility within cohousing to really think creatively and do some things that are maybe a little bit outside of typical conventional paths forward, and maybe that’s something we can all be focusing on throughout the course of the conversation, highlighting these creative possibilities in each of these different topic areas as you guys have encountered interesting and creative outside-the-box ways to keep things moving. I think that would really help our listeners come up with some ideas for their own communities. Thanks for giving us that summary.

So what we kinda wanted to do now was to spend a few minutes talking about what’s happening now within established cohousing communities. We don’t have a huge amount of data as of yet in terms of whether or not there are high numbers of foreclosures or whether cohousers are average or better or worse off in terms of their own financial standing and able to stay in their homes.

We have several questions from people who wrote in wanting to know particularly and share ideas about what are some of the ways that cohousing communities can increase both their individual and their collective resilience during a crisis like this and what sort of opportunities does cohousing provide us to be more resilient; and then what sort of ways are we aware of that neighbors can creatively help one other who are facing bankruptcy or personal financial crises, etc., and then what are some of the possibilities that cohousing provides in terms of softening the blow during a time like this.

What I’d like to ask you guys to do is to announce yourselves as you make a comment on this topic area and share with us your views and any stories you have that might be helpful to others.

[Chuck]: Lisa this is Chuck Durrett. Can I add one piece to the foundation that Jim laid out there for a second?

[Lisa]: Absolutely.

[Chuck]: You know, in 1929 when we had the other crash -- hopefully this one does not become that severe -- when we had that crash, we had a society that was much more rooted in an agriculturally-based, an agrarian-based society, we had people much more tied in to churches, much more tied in to their extended family… much tied… into even a nuclear family today with 50 percent divorce rate, over half the women in the U.S. don’t live with husbands, for example, and you know so many differences in our society that gave it a resilience at that time.

You know, I think fundamentally we can look to cohousing for offering a considerable amount of that social resilience as well as a financial side, and we should look to how do we strengthen the social side, the social network, the glue that holds cohousing together as part of that key resilience; and then secondly just like anybody who knows anybody who lived through the Depression , anybody’s parents who lived through the Depression, the one thing they learned to do more than anything else was how to save money. It’s almost frustrating, if your grandparents went through the Depression when you go shopping for something, they save every nail and etc.

We’ve been through the longest economic expansion in America’s history, 11 years, we’ve all learned to spend money profusely, and now I think it’s time to go through our budgets very, very carefully, line item by line item, and say what can we not hire out, what can we do ourselves, what can we hire our own people to do, and how can we save money? How can we learn from our grandparents about how to be careful?

And those are my two main offerings right there. And actually that’s not only living in a cohousing, but even building one – how can we be a little bit closer to the bone instead of as we’ve learned so profusely in the last few years how to spend spend spend. I mean, I know even in my own life I have to get ready to do some serious contracting in our cohousing community, we’re just starting to go through our $150,000 a year operating budget and figure out how to skinny that up and get a lot more careful about how we spend money.

[Lisa]: Absolutely. So cohousing does offer some of these opportunities for us to really work together, share ideas, and figure out how to pool our resources, or how to learn how to live more frugally, I guess, is what we’re all going to have to learn how to do.

[Bob]: This is Bob. One of the things that we’ve done that’s been interesting to watch that process start at Nyland, and I would guess in most communities now there’s actually informal groups that have begun to meet once a week or once every other week in the Common House, beginning to start that conversation.

I think that one of the things that became really interesting in the conversation at Nyland was really two thoughts. One was that for people who come to cohousing, sustainability is an important concept and so the idea that we were going to have some kind of economic adjustment or crisis is not a surprise to most people because it looked like it was crazy and unsustainable.

The second thing was, most people feel this is the first phase of actually the real sustainable issues, which is dealing with global warming and moving away from a carbon-based economy.

And so in many ways I think it’s important when we talked about it to say this is really not going to be an easy solution economically, but the context in which to think about this is really in terms of what everybody cares about in terms of long-term economic and ecological sustainability, and so the decisions that people make and the way you move forward, you need to think about these longer term issues and make sure you solve problems that are good for both the short-run economic issues and the longer-term. So even though you want to save money it probably makes a lot of sense to support as a community moving to much more energy efficiency and also affordable tanks (?) and also some kind of renewable energy that you can put together.

But I think putting it in that context has really helped Nyland, I think, understand and have a direction, rather than feeling that we have just got to react to a recession that was brought on by some bad financial decisions.

[Lisa]: Absolutely. Are there other people who have some examples from their communities, or a community that they’ve been exposed to, in terms of these specific kinds of activities – it sounds like what you’re suggesting is, we have this opportunity to actually take a more pro-active approach to this, rather than gathering the wagons and being very fearful, we can see this as an opportunity to put in place some things that are really heading in the right direction ecologically and socially.

[Bob]: Let me ask coho this one other point that has come up in the course of conversations at Nyland in that context. The other thing we found that really has become very useful to think about is actually to think about it from a systems point of view and what that means is you think about it first of all in terms of the individual people at Nyland, and individual home owners and their lives (?).

But it’s important to also think about it at a different level, which is the whole level of the community itself. And thinking about what’s good for the community, and sometimes what’s good for the community may involve hardship or some kind of constraint on people who are the individuals.

One of the conversations that happened at Nyland has been to think about what we can do at a community level and in a way setting boundaries around that or understanding, and then once we know what we can do at a community level it frees us up to be very creative about neighbor to neighbor, helping people. For example, thinking about an approach that said, “If people ran into financial trouble and people stopped paying their dues, how many of those people can the community actually handle before it has to raise dues on the rest of the community?” and that’s not something most people want to think about, but by talking about it in that way and setting boundaries, we can then say we now know what the rules are at the community level. That frees people up to realize that if someone individually is in trouble, it’s going to be their neighbors that will probably go over there and try to be very creative in helping them that may or may not be done as an official community program.

And I think the other thing that comes up with that is there’s a very, very strong need to also think about it at the level of cohousing more broadly even than in a community. Because if cohousing can begin to be seen as a place of [inaudible], a place that’s getting its act together, both the value of the cohousing units themselves are going to stay strong and go up, but it’s [also] going to attract a lot of people to cohousing. But I think it’s been very useful to think about it at these different levels and realize… you have to think about them separately and they fit together… but we’re not going to solve this problem simply by focusing on the individual needs of individual people: the community has to be thought about.

[Jim]: I agree with Bob that this is all about community, and how community plays a significant role in sustainability, not just environmental sustainability, but social and economic sustainability [as well]. I think that existing cohousing communities have to look at how well their community is working from a sustainability standpoint, actual togetherness, working through problems and doing what Chuck talked about, saving money together. We see it all the time in cohousing communities, and I just experienced it this morning at Silver Sage.

We had our fall workday… we’re just a bunch of old folks, you know, and this is senior cohousing, but we probably did a couple thousand dollars worth of work if we’d’ve hired it out, painting and things like that. And it was a kick, you know, people enjoyed it and there were people at different levels of ability to deal with it, but that’s the sort of thing that…

There’s a synergy in community that relates to sustainability and it relates to what we as a human race have to do if we’re going to survive on this planet, and I think that’s the key -- coming back to that idealism that brought a lot of us to cohousing -- and try to push our way through the frustration of dealing with the community and really getting the positive aspect of it out – it’s hard work

[Craig]: One of our listeners wrote and inquired about specific examples of cohousing neighbors helping other neighbors, not on the community level but on a neighborly level. (and I’m out.)

[Chuck]: Well that has happened since the very first cohousing in 1991 in Davis, California, the first chousing in the US where we had two neighbors who couldn’t actually qualify to buy a house and two separate neighbors came forward and coincidentally loaned each of those two neighbors $10K each, and then all 26 households were able to move in. That’s been happening from the beginning, and I imagine that will continue to happen.

But like Jim says, you know, it will be highly facilitated by cohousing communities functioning on all cylinders; in other words, people are able to build the strong social structure, the community base, that makes people very, very willing to accomplish that.

[Lisa]: I’ve seen that, too, in some of these communities that I studied as I was doing my dissertation research. I noticed that it was a trend across all of them that they had in one form or another done exactly what you just described, and this idea of either an investment pool or cooperatively purchasing, doing a split ownership of a house or going in together to purchase a house that would allow someone to rent from that group or from the community at large or even to help a neighbor who had a small business that was struggling and developing a cooperative investment pool.

I think the interesting thing there is that when you have relationships, long-term relationships and high levels of trust, and you put a structure underneath that that will create something sort of formal, that allows some interesting and creative opportunities to help one another through some tough financial times. That trust and reciprocity come into play, I think.

[]:Is it okay to say, “Amen, sister” every once in awhile? I think so. Amen. Amen.

[Lisa]: Does anyone on the panel want to add anything to this particular topic in terms of specific examples or ideas that we can share before we move on to the second theme, which is people who… the struggles, the trials, and hopefully the opportunities of people in the building phase.

[Jim]: I’ve got one, and maybe Rick can chime in on this one, but I really think cohousing communities are neighborhoods and they are little pockets of real estate, there’s no question, but sense of place is a very important [concept?], and if you look at what some of the sociologists have written about place, people like Ray Oldenberg, Ray Good Place? What happens is, it creates a way for us to make connections that have real value to us.

I really think that the most severe hardships we’re going to see in this current situation are people losing their jobs, and then they can’t make their mortgage payments, they can’t make their HOA payments, and I think that just having a network of neighbors that are a lot closer than in any other kind of neighborhood can really make a difference in helping people work their way out of those kinds of situations and make their lives work.

[Rick]: Actually I was going to speak specifically to the job thing, because I agree that is going to be for a lot of people the greatest vulnerability. There’s this concept -- I think Robert Putnam coined the term “the strength of weak ties,” -- the idea that a person who has a network of relationships that are actually not deep but that are real with a diverse group of folks, that creates tremendous resilience.

I’ve seen that in my own community where if someone loses a job, and everyone in the community is aware of it, and because we’re all dispersed, and professionally in so many different social networks, that if you have someone who can help you navigate the employment system at the University of California-Davis or the state government or whatever the large employment systems are, you’ve got a huge in. And they don’t have to be your best friend, they just have to be someone who knows you well enough that they’re willing to help coach you a little bit and help open a few doors for you. I’ve seen that work over a decade of my own experience living, what I do, I suspect we’re going to see even more of that in the years ahead.

[Chuck]: And cohousers employing each other. We’ve had two of our residents employed at McCamant & Durrett Architects the last few months, it’s a great old village life form, we walk to work together, we walk home from work together, so if we can sustain it, it’s really, really great from an old village level.

[Lisa]: Another interesting opportunity might be -- I’d be curious to hear if you guys have heard any examples of this – is in really tough times neighbors coming together to do some entrepreneurship or start a business or start some sort of endeavor if jobs are scarce, you know, kind of going that route, and I wonder if any of you have encountered any of those examples, whether it’s a gardening service or whatever, just people coming up with things together in the context of community.

[Chuck]: Well we have an increased interest in our community which has 57 adults and 94 people altogether, so it’s large enough to generate some of those possibilities, we have an increased interest to definitely hire in when it comes to pruning the apple trees, and people are interested in learning how to do that stuff. I expect to see a lot more of that, too.

It will be challenging for cohousers to hire from within, I think we’ll do it, but it’s always a little challenging when you hire from within, and you fire from within (that’s always a possibility), so I think the challenge is to get that on the table from the very beginning, you know, you shift the priorities toward hiring from within, and then you bank on people learning how to do things as well as any professional, but you put on the table early on, if this doesn’t work out, we have to have the option to make other choices down the line.

[Lisa]: There’s one other issue that I wanted to bring up and see if you guys had any examples of this in your own communities. If things really do get very tough as the U.S. has seen during the Great Depression and people are beginning to lose jobs, unable to pay their mortgage, I’m wondering if we would expect to see a trend where neighbors will really work to try to help keep one another in the communities, whether that may be – maybe one house has to get foreclosed on, but saying “rent from me” or “let’s go in and share on this mortgage” or things like that, which will allow residents to stay in the community under some sort of creative mechanism.

[Chuck]: (This is Chuck again. I promise I will be quiet after this.) I’m surprised that we haven’t seen a lot more of that to date, and the only reason I think it’s not the case is because we’ve had 11 years of expansion, but I’m surprised. Cohousing worked so great as a shared house, largely because you have the whole other Common House, etc. You have so many other physical outlets and therefore, emotional, outlets on site that you’re not always on top of each other, you know, with dinner three or four times a week in the Common House, etc., you can have dinner at home, you can have dinner in the Common House, and elsewhere, so it always made sense to me.

I think we’re probably going to own less real estate in the future than we have in the past, because banks aren’t going to give us the money for free any more. My biggest surprise of all times was when we had three mortgage brokers from Wells Fargo Bank walk into our cohousing committee when we were in the planning phase with 40 people sitting there and say, “I’ll give all of you guys a zero-down payment loan if you want.” That’s not going to happen anymore. People are going to have to have real equity. Therefore it might require two people to buy a house just to make the down payment in the future.

[Craig]: One of our listeners is really frustrated about our soft talk and is eager for us to get to specific information on the economic conditions. I think s/he is primarily interested in the next questions we are going to be moving on to.

[Lisa]: That’s a good segue into this set of questions around folks who find themselves in the building phase. They’ve got an outlay of cash or some investment there, and they’re trying to get their community built, etc. There’s a lot of questions. There’s certainly some anxiety out there for those folks. In terms of addressing those concerns and needs, a couple of questions that we have if you guys can give some advice on, would be really helpful.

For people in the designing/planning phase, should groups be looking to modify their plans? Should they be letting go of expensive options? If they’d been planning to build green, should they be letting go of those things, should they be keeping those things, should they be looking to build small and cheap, what kinds of advice could you give to those folks who are in the design and planning phase, and making those decisions in terms of responding to the current situation?

[Chuck] Lean and mean. Make the community work first. In other words, we’ve been in the habit of spending a lot of money in the last few years, so yeah, make the house simple -- simple, elegant, and beautiful, but don’t gild the lily.

It’s true that we all aspire to be as sustainable as possible. The number one thing we can do is make a small, elegant house that really feels right; fits like a glove and not like a grocery bag; and is not too costly to build.

That said, there are a lot of small strategies for making sure you get the sustainable lumber -- not later, you can’t do that later – in the deal, and it’s probably going to be a little bit larger down payment, and so therefore it goes back to, you know – meet with a mortgage broker who’s very disciplined.

When we did Muir Commons (you know we had nine graduate students, it was very complicated getting all these people in their houses), we had a woman who sat down with them, and said, “Oh you go to the movies three times a month now? Now you’re going to the movies once a month. You have a new car: you have to sell that and buy an old car.” And very, very strategically [they] learned how to put their down payment in place.

To be sustainable in the future, we’re probably going to be looking at not 20 percent down payments but 25 percent, just because of appraisal problems, where our houses cost five or ten percent more than the neighbor’s house costs. I don’t know, Jim, what do you think about that?

[Jim]: Well, I think you’re right about the units’ having to keep getting smaller. That’s been the case with cohousing: you’re really trading off space for quality. There’s no question in my mind they’re also going to be greener. They can cue/queue(?) to LEED, the whole environmental movement, because that’s the nature of the product: small. I think we’re going to be doing net zero net carbon neutral cohousing on a regular basis in the future, and it will cost more, not less, but it can cost less if they’re smaller units.

Developers and people, they’ve gotten used to selling housing by the pound, and the bigger it is the cheaper you can do it. But I think we’re going to have to rethink how we live. Cohousing is such an ideal example of how you can do it through a community. You can share common spaces. Not everybody needs a big living room to entertain people in. That’s the direction I think it’s going to go in. On any of our communities that we’re starting now, we’re looking at that really hard. How do you do it small and yet very elegant. It’s high quality – it’s not cheap stuff. Cohousing will never be cheap.

[Lisa]: Do you guys all feel that banks will be receptive to this increasingly in the future, or is your sense that it’s going to be even harder for cohousing groups to get the financing under them for communities that are a little bit less conventional? What’s your take on that?

[Chuck]: Well we have some real work to do with the banks to show them how small the foreclosure rate is. As of right now, I don’t know of one single foreclosure in cohousing. Does anybody?

[Jim]: There’s one in Ann Arbor that we heard about recently. I think it’s an old one, it’s not caused by the current situation.

[Chuck]: I see. So I think we’re going to have to build some foundation there with the banks. And we’re going to have to get a lot broader with banks, too, and think about how we’re going to go with more stable, bigger banks.

The challenge with cohousing, one of the many challenges, is you’re working with a group for two or three years, you don’t want to be vulnerable when you get right to the end. Maybe we’ll get a great, responsible, very-very ultra responsible, small community bank, but I think we’re going to have to be thinking about larger bankers in the future.

I’m thinking about going to Denmark this summer, because they have a couple banks there who loan exclusively to cohousing, I mean not exclusively, but cohousers can quite readily go to those two banks over and over again reliably. I’m seriously thinking about going there this summer and talking to those banks about loaning to the U.S. because I just recently heard that they’re interested. So I think we have to think about new banks, because we can’t be held hostage to their whims about, “Oh we think we’re capped out for this year.” We’ve got to be more reliable than that.

[Bob]: I was going to say that one of the things, and I think again in a concrete way that’s going to be required… When you think of this again at the community level, in the forming of the community one of the risks that exists is that people sign up, they want to be a part of it, and then at the end they’re not able actually to buy their unit. That puts the whole project at risk.

So, I think one of the things that’s going to happen practically – two things: one is -- people are going to have to qualify more stringently and earlier, and I suspect there will be increased penalties put into the contracts for people, that say, “If you pull out for any reason before you … at the time the project is actually ready to move into, there is an increasingly higher penalty that you’re going to have to pay, because you’re putting everybody else at risk.” My sense is at one level the banks are going to require that, and like all of these problems, there’s a tendency to try and not deal with that up front.

One of the really good things about cohousing is that you can ask or talk about hard questions up front. So even though there may be people in these forming groups that you would love to have, I think that one of the concrete things you’re going to have to do is look at people and say, “Can you really participate in this?” Because it doesn’t do anybody any favors, either the individuals or the community, to sort of hope against hope that you could get people in.

When the market was going up and the economy was strong, there was a lot of chance that something wonderful would happen, and you could bring people in. I think if the general sense is that it’s going to be tough and it will be declining, the chances of some kind of wonderful event happening to get people who are marginal into the project, the chances of that happening are going down. So in a way, in these groups, you’re going to have to deal with those problems sooner and probably in a more clear way.

[Craig]: One of the communities that wrote in say that they have their completion date of April 2, 2009, and they have eleven unsold units. They’re self-developing, everyone’s a shareholder, and they’d like to know if they should start marketing through realtors and mainstream methods. Should they accept anyone who can afford a unit and not worry about getting to know them first?

[Jim]: This sounds very familiar. We had almost an identical situation in Fresno for the people who are moving in now. The community was about 70 percent pre-sold when we broke ground, and we did nothing but lose sales through the whole construction period, so now we’re probably about 50 percent with solid buyers. We’re doing everything we can to keep people in the community, and we’re doing things like putting people in on lease options to buy, that are struggling somewhat to pull all the pieces together and get enough equity out of their previous house, so there’s a lot of creative things you can do.

In terms of going to realtors, what we’ve found that works pretty well is, if you can expose what you’re doing to the real estate community – and right now they’re looking for anything to talk about – we’ve had a lot of good luck going to the green realtors. There’s usually a local group that specializes in green houses, houses that are better environmentally, and these guys are trying to get educated on it. We’ve had educational seminars at our communities for them, and at the same time they start to see – you show them -- how community plays an important part in green building and sustainability.

They become familiar with a product, then you basically -- I work on a cooperative basis with them. Rather than list with a specific realtor – if you’re going to list with a realtor, it better be somebody who really knows cohousing, preferably someone that lives in it. And then they’ll go out and hustle the other realtors.

But I think you definitely want to expose the real estate community, and you don’t want to worry about whether they’re going to bring you people that don’t like cohousing. I can tell you, nobody buys a cohousing unit – you’re stupid if you buy a cohousing unit and don’t like cohousing, because you’re paying a premium to get into a community. What you just have to look at, you’re always going to get some diversity in community. You’ve got to get over that hump of “well, we have to get people qualified, they have to understand everything.” Occasionally you get somebody that thinks they just want to be part of it, but they’re too hardheaded to want to participate in the community, but just lay out clearly what the expectations are and you’ll either drive them away or you’ll sell them.

[Lisa]: I just want to summarize some of these ideas, so we make sure that we… I think it’s real useful to generate this menu or this brainstorming. One I heard is, it’s actually possible, one creative idea is this idea of leasing, and getting people in via leasing, and I guess that means that the LLC or the developing entity holds the mortgage, and then they do a lease-to-own option. Is that correct?

[Jim]: Yes, and actually, often it’s the construction lender that’s holding the bag, and what you’re trying to do is make sure that we collect some revenue to be able to service the construction loan and then eventually you can roll those lease options into investor [units?], so there might be other members of the community that are affluent enough to be able to purchase the unit at a discount and then hold it and be able to get their money back plus some return on it when the person buys it or someone else steps up and buys it.

There’s a lot of creative things you can do, and it really helps having a cohousing community. There’re resources both within the community and within their network of people that you don’t have if you’re just an isolated developer dealing with a bunch of strange people who don’t know each other.

[Lisa]: We talked about the lease option, we talked about educating realtors, and really getting them to get the idea. Are there some other good ideas out there that people building these communities should be considering or exploring?

[Rick]: I’d like to address a couple of issues, if I could, just about the real estate market and how to think about the moment that we’re in right now. Because what I’ve observed working with groups is that one of the dangers that forming groups have is getting too emotionally attached to a project to a point where it sort of blinds them to some of the realities, and I think that’s especially dangerous right now.

I’m looking at this from the perspective of being in California, which is at the front end of this whole real estate crisis, and I think what I’ve seen indicates that we probably are at the bottom in California. The rest of the country might not be there yet. One big issue you see is a group, if they’re in the process of negotiating on a site, falling in love with it, and then that really colors their ability to effectively negotiate, but it’s a problem beyond that as well.

And this is where, if there are groups on the call that might, say, have a contract on a piece of line right now, at a price that’s really way over maybe what that land’s actually worth today. What we know is that in a real estate crunch/crisis like we’re in, while home prices drop substantially, actually the land prices are far more volatile. There are parcels of land in the Sacramento region, for example, today that are worth 20 percent or less what they were, say, three years ago.

We were, for example, working with a group like that. We were doing some consulting with them. They had optioned a site [to option a site?]. Basically they had entered into an agreement for $2.5 million for the site, and we called them out and said, “You need to take a look at this thing, because it’s not worth that anymore.” We took a hard look and we decided at best it was worth a million dollars. Now the group had put in some money. They’d put in $150,000 whatever into some planning, but an ordinary real estate developer would look at that and say, “You know, I need to be willing to walk away from the money I’ve put into it because what I’ll lose is far greater.”

What I’m saying, my message to groups is, “be willing to take a really hard look if you’re in an early stage and determine where you’re at. If you have to make hard decisions, the faster you make them, the better.” And that’s what this group did. They went with our advice and went back to the owner and forced the issue with the owner on the value of the site.

The other thing about the market I’d like to point out, we’re in a funny place right now where home prices are being valued by what’s happening in the foreclosure market. At least in California. The percentage of sales is primarily right now coming from foreclosures, and so foreclosures are artificially driving home prices below the replacement value. And that’s going to happen while we continue through this bubble of foreclosures.

At some point in the next couple years that market – in California, there’s a brisk sale on foreclosures. The inventory of homes is dropping because the foreclosure pricing has gone down so much. So part of withstanding what’s going on right now is to being able to look far enough ahead to see once we get through that foreclosure situation, the price of homes will start creeping back up to what it costs to actually build them, which is not where it is right now.

In one of our projects in Grass Valley, for example, our bank said, “We think you’d be better off if you waited to start construction, start some of your site work, until spring.” That was really hard for us to hear, but as we think about it and look ahead, actually, if we just look at the market cycles, that kind of advice in the long run -- if we want to hit the market with these new homes at the right time -- that might actually be really prudent advice. Being aware and cognizant of these broader cycles is, I think, critical.

[Lisa]: So it may actually make sense for some groups to consider holding off until the market comes back up a little bit.

[Rick]: It just depends where you’re at and what the timing on your project is. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, but it might.

[Craig]: One of our writers said, “But what about us?! We have to sell now! Help!”

[Lisa]: I wonder if you guys have specific suggestions, concrete and creative ideas for folks who are losing group members because of the anxiety or increasing risk aversion or perhaps people being uncertain about future income. So have you guys come across any good ideas for how to keep people at the table or how to keep these groups from shrinking, or on getting these houses moved?

[Jim]: I think that cohousers panic and feel like, “Oh, we’re competing with the rest of the housing world out there, and the foreclosures,” and really, you’re not. You’re competing with yourselves. The problem you have is because cohousing is a very, very thin slice of the housing market. Most people don’t understand it. Helping people understand it better and walking your talk, it’s really a product for proactive, idealistic people . They want to live in a neighborhood that really does more than just provide housing for them.

I think one of the worst strategies is to start discounting and things. When you look at housing, it’s priced at all different price points, and cohousing tends to be high for the size of the homes, but what people get is a lot of other things, not only the Common [inaudible], but the value of the community. This is the time to really pull your community together and start really functioning well, and then reach out. The only advice you can say is to keep reaching out and I think the most successful things we’ve done are having events, slide shows like McCamant and Durrett have done for years, building on people.

It’s amazing where the customers are coming from. We’re not getting very many, but where they come from – they’re people who were exposed to cohousing ten-twenty years ago, or somebody they know has lived in it. So they’re not people that are new in the housing market. You’ve got to just keep the idealism behind cohousing growing and glowing. It’s more than just a housing opportunity.

[Chuck]: It’s an opportunity to survive, and actually even in a whole other level. We talk about the community and the finances, and the community especially is sometimes nebulous. First and foremost, it’s a psychological issue, and if an individual is having a crisis, it adds up to the community having a crisis basically. I firmly believe that you need to find a mechanism in your cohousing group, not only in your existing cohousing group, but your forming cohousing group to give each other permission to be open and honest about your financial situation so that others can help you proactively.

For example in Fresno, people dropped out and nobody even knew it was going to happen to them. It happened at the last minute, they just panicked and they went. If they had said two months previously, “You know, I’m getting really nervous,” others – as Rick was mentioning earlier – could have helped them, and their job network could have helped them at so many levels.

The Great Depression was [in]famous for what it did to people psychologically, and here we have again this opportunity with cohousing to proactively give ourselves permission to say, have a forum or something, and go around and say, “I’m really struggling, I’m having a tough time.” You don’t have to say, “Reach out and help me,” I don’t think, because people will reach out and help you.

That psychological threshold is real, and if cohousing can’t breach that, I don’t know what can. I know it can, because I’ve seen people proactively give others permission at a lot of levels, around helping with their own lives, that have so many levels, whether it’s marriage or otherwise.

We have a huge resource, if we can tap into it, which is each other basically, and the huge resources of giving and listening and brainstorming and being creative together. You know we can do wonders for the individual, and it’s that individual we have to worry about at this time, because these individuals add up to a community. Cohousing and community -- it’s a very real web, if we tap into it, as Jim was saying. We’ve just been tapping into it at the surface for the most part.

[Bob]: I was just going to say two things. One is, for the group that was saying, “Help!” I think it’s important if there are other cohousing communities nearby -- I would really now link to them, because what’s going to convince people in the forming group that this is going to work is to actually to have meetings in an existing cohousing community and be able to see and be told about the kinds of creative cooperation that is starting to happen in that other community. People when they get worried are not going to trust people telling them that it’s okay, that community will solve their problem. They’re going to want to see it on the ground happening.

I think the other point that is important to make from my point of view, when we were talking at Nyland, one of the people raised the point and said, “You know, even cohousing can’t keep people at Nyland from dying. But if someone is dying and has a terminal disease, being in a place where you know people is a much more supportive place to go through that.” And so the way that fits back to what Chuck is talking about -- to the group that is struggling or is in this position -- you may not be able to save everyone in the community. That doesn’t mean you can’t help them and be with them through that process. So there’s a difference. The mission of cohousing – it may not be able to save everyone that it cares about. That will depend on how extreme the situation gets. But I think by telling people that, you actually make people feel better. Because a kind of vague promise that everyone will take care of each other if people are worried especially coming in on a new basis, they don’t have any reason to trust that.

[Lisa]: I wanted to reinforce that point, and also what Chuck mentioned, which was -- our community was in this phase, the building phase, right after the mini-recession after 9/11. What we did concretely in terms of what you were talking about, Chuck -- we had a couple people in the community who were very good with finances and numbers, and a lot of people who were very, very scared at that point and weren’t very good with numbers. So we created a team of those two people and they became a consulting team to help sit down with people in the community who were feeling a lot of anxiety. There was a sort of pact where they agreed they wouldn’t disclose any of the information, and they helped them think creatively through their personal financial situation and figure out ways that they could make this work.

That helped, as you said, on the psychological level. For people who really have a heart for living in cohousing and really want to do it but are pretty terrified about the finances and get really intimidated by the whole working out the numbers thing, that was a very powerful way. I think we kept three or four households in our community as a result of their being able to enter into that process. So there’s at least a concrete example of how that could happen in a building or forming community.

[Chuck]: You need to go from a place where yesterday you wouldn’t imagine talking to your neighbor about money to tomorrow I feel the need and the desire and the want to disclose anything that I need to disclose where others can come to the table and help me out if they can. It’s very binary that way. You give each other permission. Yesterday I couldn’t imagine talking about money, today I couldn’t imagine not talking about money because that’s what’s going to make it work.

[Lisa]: Okay, are there any other comments, suggestions in terms of helping communities who are trying to keep their members and trying to get through this bumpy phase? I want to make sure we don’t miss any good suggestions here.

[Craig]: There is a question about how it relates to trying to sell existing homes.

[Chuck]: Existing houses in a new cohousing community or in an existing cohousing community?

[Craig]: Existing conventional homes in order to be able to purchase a new unit.

[Jim]: That is probably the biggest problem both for members of the community and new people coming in who are attracted to the concept but have to get rid of their house. What we are doing in Fresno and also doing in -- we have four units left in our little Lyons community in Colorado, near Boulder. It’s a great opportunity for people to go in and try it on a lease option. What we are telling them is “Rent your house and move in!” This is a perfect opportunity. There are actual cohousing units you can move into right now in Fresno and Lyons and maybe elsewhere.

From our standpoint [inaudible] it covers at least part if not all of the cash flow requirements for that unit, so it’s better than having it sit there vacant. You get a valuable member that is really interested in cohousing, because nobody’s going to rent that unit, just because it’s a bargain -- you’re not going to rent it at a bargain price. It’s sort of a win-win when you can’t sell the darned things to anybody because the market’s so slow. I think that’s a good strategy when you get people that are really interested, and we’re doing it!

[Chuck]: And if any day in the future we get the situation where we get a high-powered investment pool together where people can actually buy up these houses planning to make a profit later, so that others can move into cohousing -- I’m just hopeful that possibility is on the horizon. That kind of bigger financial possibility is on the horizon. More horsepower to be more flexible in the market to help people manifest their cohousing dream.

[Jim]: I’m going to be out in San Francisco working with Katie and Rick and Bob at the Green Festival. The real goal for going out there for all of us to make connections with socially conscious investment groups that might have an interest in coming on board. We’ve got our own little group of cohousing investors that we want to try to expand, too. I think this is really important for cohousing to get a foothold in the socially conscious investment movement. We can show people that it’s a very low risk We’ve got units that we can package together as investments. It’s not a way to make a lot of money. It’s not like the thing we’ve just been through where people are making double-digit returns churning up a lot of stuff that wasn’t worth anything, but there’s good returns. That’s what Bob’s been doing for years, but we’ve just got to expand that base.

[Lisa]: I want to make people aware that we are at the hour. We had sorta said that we are going to leave things open to continue beyond that, but I want to be sensitive to the fact that some of the panelists may need to go. Is there anybody in the group who needs to get off the line at this point? Okay great, we’re okay going on for a little bit. Another question that came up that maybe you guys have some good advice on, is for projects that are in a position for having put out relatively large cash outlays already and are carrying some significant debt, do you have specific suggestions for them in terms of ways to stabilize their projects to cover their carrying costs during the downturn? Also do you have good advice for folks in terms of how best to refinance some acquisition loans and things like that? Any comments on that for folks who find themselves in that situation?

[Chuck]: Drastic times take drastic means. It’s going to be interesting. I hope we can be creative. I could imagine, for example, in a project that’s half sold out, renting houses to non-cohousers, for example, in the short term, and as people buy those houses and as some renters move out, others move in.

There’s a project in Denmark, a 40-unit project, where they ended up doing it partially because they felt they built the project too big, but they ended up selling six houses as condos but they did them on the parking side so they were able to maintain the integrity of the social structure they were hoping to achieve via the architecture. That is, the people who were around the Common House were part of the cohousing, and the other pieces were sold as condos. But I could imagine renting those out to people who are just thinking about cohousing, can’t qualify yet. It’s going to be challenging to figure out who absorbs the balance of that mortgage potentially, but those are my two thoughts right now.

[Jim]: Well the other thing is negotiate with your lenders. I think all of the banks are in a position now where they’re going to have to negotiate. They’ve got projects that are not able to meet their payment requirements. So if you can bring something to the table in that negotiation rather than say “well, we’re broke and we don’t have anything.”

The advantage you have with a cohousing project, is that the people who are doing that project are the best ones to work out of it. So that’s the last thing a bank wants to do is take it over, they don’t know what to do with it. So as long as you can be halfway professional and you’ve got a plan and you keep hanging in there…

You know, I went through this with the housing disasters back in the eighties when banks were literally going broke, the savings and loans were at that time, and we dealt with resolution trusts and people like that. We were upside down, our company was worthless -- had a negative net worth at that time, it was so bad -- and yet we were the ones that survived because we hung in there, just walked through those projects and were able to the… lenders… their money out of them eventually as the market came back, so just being able to show that you will stick it out and that you’re willing to work at it is I think the best solution. And then get in and negotiate with your lenders.

[Lisa]:So it sounds like it’s really important for groups that find themselves in that position not to panic but really be willing to push, push their lenders, push in professional ways, not to go in the freak-out area but come up with a plan you can present to the lender that will put them in a better position.

[Jim]: And this is the time to hang together, and look like you’re a community, and like the community is worth something -- not to look like you’re all scattered. Obviously, you need good leadership. You want to pull together. Because the banks, I tell you, are going to look bad. Compared to some builder that left town and left them with a bunch of houses they’ll think you’re wonderful. Then you just ask them, “What can you do for us? How bout lowering the interest rate? How bout deferring payments until-“ They’ll want to get paid as quickly as they can, so they’ll want the proceeds out of the closings. I think it’s a work out situation and you’re in a damn good position, if you’ve got a good grip on your project. Now if it’s all screwed up, not being managed right, then you’ve got a problem.

[Lisa]: In the last few minutes that we have, I wanted to move a little bit to identifying some of the areas of opportunity. In a down market there are always some things that open up.

[Craig]: There’s also something we’ve missed which is really the early forming group. They don’t have their plan together in terms of staging, they haven’t even decided perhaps whether they’re doing retrofit or new construction. One person suggested that this is the time to do a retrofit project where you can buy foreclosure properties in a particular neighborhood, for example.

[Lisa]: And there may be newly built neighborhoods that are just not selling, and does that actually pose an opportunity for some forming groups that haven’t committed to a piece of property or specific plan. Do you guys see that as a potential opportunity for cohousing?

[Chuck]: Well if you can hold together, you’re probably not going to ask for a better time for some time to buy a piece of property, for example, and you’re not going to find a better time to build anything than you are right now. Nowadays you can have ten contractors at your doorstep with less than a week’s notice, when it was only five years ago you had to beg, borrow, or steal to get one contractor to your doorstep, to do stuff, because it was a boom.

We were building 1.6 million houses a year in the U.S. in 200[6], and last year it was 836,000, and it will be less than 700,000 in 2008, so if you can stay the course as Jim so aptly suggests, and stay centered, don’t make any dumb mistakes, don’t do anything that’s too emotional for sure, now is the time to buy. If you have any liquidity at all, this is the time, this is the time.

And I would like to come back and just say something about the psychology side. [In] our little cohousing -- 57 adults, a little microcosm -- you can see what’s happening. We have two people who are running around saying, “Oh god, the sky is falling! What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” We have 20 people who are very clear about what it looked like before the Depression with the extended families and with agriculture and with community community community, and they are very clear that we are well positioned to ride this out because we have community. There are another 35 people are just sorta like, “listen to the wind.”

And it’s really a function of those 20 people who are centered that’s going to make this no less than very survivable. It’s completely a function of those people who have not only historical context but have lived in a community-like setting before, and can see it as a real… the anchor that’s going to make the rest of it work. Whatever you do financially, it helps to stay calm and analytical, extremely analytical. I don’t know if this answered the question or not.

[Bob]: One thing again that I would suggest, if you are a forming group, if you’re in an area that has existing cohousing, now’s the time to build some of those bridges. I think I would begin talking and hosting sessions more broadly than just cohousing in my PR and my outreach. I would start hosting sessions on “how can people work together to support each other in an economic downturn”, because that’s going to be a question that a lot of people are interested in. And if you could, for example, arrange to host those sessions in the Common House of an existing community, and the community members, one or two, could share what’s going on in that cohousing community, actions are going to speak a lot louder than words there.

[Lisa]: I just wanted to clarify, are you suggesting that this is an opportunity for existing and forming groups to reach out to the broader community, a “fliers up in the library” kind of thing, to have a broader community discussion?

[Bob]: Yeah! What I would do is not talk immediately about how cohousing is the function for this. I would reach out to people and say, “How can people connect with each other and help each other, to support each other through this at a community level?” And host maybe the first meeting at a community library.

But I would then move those venues, if you have a cohousing community locally, I would move those to the Common House. This is a community outreach. And what will come out of that is, “Look at how these people who live in this kind of place are getting twice the leverage that we are.” In terms of an opportunity, you have a real opportunity to get publicity and to basically triple the number of people who suddenly pay attention to what cohousing offers.

[Lisa]: Excellent. Before we wrap things up, I want to give everybody a chance if they have a closing comment or if something they have they haven’t been able to get across at this point but really want to share before we bring things to a close.

[Rick]: I’d love to jump in. And I want to get on this whole idea of opportunity with a couple of very concrete examples. In one area where we’re working, Oakland, there’s a lot of over-building in the condo market. This is just a huge opportunity. Just as an example, I was talking on the phone yesterday with a guy who is a developer who’s got a 21-unit condo building in uptown Oakland, and he just shared with me that the price on that building dropped from $10 million down to $8.2 million; and he’d be very open, very interested, in doing a bulk sale. And we talked about his building. It would be so easy to convert that to cohousing, because the way it’s structured you could create common areas pretty easily. So that’s one opportunity.

And then the other opportunity, and this is where it goes back to the point I was raising about emotions and not getting caught up in emotions, and Chuck just spoke to that, if you are actually watching who’s coming into the market now -- we’re certainly looking at this in California -- there are equity funds that are assembling pools of money in the hundreds of millions of dollars to go in and snap up distressed sites. They’re doing it. They’re doing it right now, because there are incredible bargains.

I actually got a call out of the blue by a land broker that I know who helped us find another site years ago – East Bay -- San Francisco East Bay. He has just incredible site [inaudible] amazing amount of space for being right in the core of an urban area. It’s everything that every group has always asked for, and it’s at a good price. And yet when I start putting out feelers to the cohousers that I know in the area, everyone is so scared right now. No one is ready. People who are members of forming groups, who have expressed interest in doing something, no one’s ready to step up yet and make the offer. This isn’t the time to be afraid, this is the time to be thinking real clearly and seeing opportunities as they do come up.

[Chuck]: Oh yes, I’m working with a group in Portland right now who just bought this really rundown apartment building -- 37 units -- and all they’re building new is a new Common House. And they’re going to start at $150,000… I’m very impressed with what they’re able to accomplish by buying an old distressed apartment building… Half the apartments are only 505 sq. ft. The number one goal they’re accomplishing is getting into a cohousing community affordably. They basically sold 33 out of 37 units immediately, because they were able to keep the cost down, found a building that was very reasonably priced and that needed to be rehabbed anyway -- it was the bottom of the bottom -- but they’re doing a great job.

[Jim]: I would really agree that this is the best time I’ve seen -- working for cohousing for 20 years -- best time I’ve seen to actually get involved and get a new project going for the reasons you’ve heard. There’s sites available, we’re going to go through a recovery period where construction is going to be as low a cost as we’re going to see it probably way into the future. I can’t think of a more ideal time to do it, that’s always the time when everyone is scared to death and doesn’t want to do it. That’s why I think the really important thing is for us to focus on the cause of the movement itself.

What are the merits of it? Why is this a smart investment for our whole society to be making? So we can go get the financial backing we need to acquire the sites and put these projects in place. If we can show that we can actually expand this little movement beyond just a few people -- just the groovy cohousers that want to live this way -- and that it’s a lot more than that, that this is part of creating a sustainable society, I think we’ll find that the resource is there, our job is just to [come out and shoot quicker??] than a lot of other solutions.

We are going to see housing reinvented in a lot of different ways in the next few years as it starts to come back, and hopefully the whole tract housing […] that we had in the past is going to be mostly behind us. Let’s hope gas prices don’t stay down.

[Lisa]: Okay, I think if we’ve heard from everybody here who had a final comment to weigh in on, I’m going to bring things to a close. Is that accurate, that most people have…

[Chuck]: I just want to say, as Jim was alluding to here, first and foremost, if you live in cohousing now, make your cohousing work. Make sure you feel like you are reaching your potential as a community. Not that the other pieces will [necessarily] fall into place, but you’ll optimize your ability to ride this out for sure. I’m sure glad I live in cohousing now. I feel very, very lucky as things get more complicated that I have a lot of great people to turn to and make it easier.

[Lisa]: Absolutely. I think that’s also a story that is probably going to resonate more broadly, and I think that idea of reaching out to the broader community and helping people understand… Those of us living in cohousing, a lot of us share that same feeling of greater resilience, and greater sense of security and the ability to maintain quality of life through things other than material means. Cohousing really affords that.

Getting that message out does create a lot of opportunity for the cohousing movement more broadly because there is probably more receptivity to that right now than there has been in the last generation or so. So that is some good opportunities -- it’s not all gloom and doom for us. Thankfully.

I want to thank you all for participating and taking your time to share with everybody in the cohousing movement across the country and it’s really appreciated. For those people who are listening or maybe came in a little bit late -- if you missed any of this conversation, you can hear the whole thing by going to the cohousing association website. The fully recorded conference is going to be available there.

And I guess unless anybody else has any other comments I just want to say thank you and I hope this is going to be a trend that will continue, that we’ll have these conversations and make them available more broadly and that the Cohousing U.S. organization is committed to providing information and serving as a resource to cohousers across the country as we move into the future.

[Chuck]: Thank you, Lisa, very much. You did a stellar job. You’re awesome.

[Donna]: Lisa, there is a post conference survey on the website on the home page. If people would like to give us more feedback on how we’re doing and how we should do this better in the future, that would be great.

[Lisa]: Okay so groovy cohousers -- thanks for attending and I hope we will come together in the not distant future.