An exciting week for 3 cohousing communities: sites selected

Over the past week cohousing groups in Brooklyn, Chicago and Southeastern Pennsylvania, announced that they have secured sites or development partners.
Why is this so exciting? In short: most cohousing groups that don't have land secured fail. Most that do get site approval proceed to succeed. Getting a site "optioned" is the first big step on the path to change from the former to the latter category.
The groups are in:

• Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Cohousing
• Chicago, IL: Prairie Onion Cohousing
• West Grove, PA: Three Groves EcoVillage, spinning off from Concord EcoVillage

What makes me think we'll see more cohousing get built out of this round is that at least two are groups that previously had a site optioned but let it go when it became clear that the first site did not "pencil out" to meet their needs at the right price. The first site turned out to be a fire drill, a learning experience in which they sorted out priorities, capacities, values, and process, so we can take their second-site choice more seriously.

The Brooklyn group says it will renovate a warehouse into 31 homes, studio to three bedroom. It had started pursuit on a site last Fall but then dropped the option when it didn't "pencil out"

Prairie Onion, the longtime searching group in Chicago, announced a developer partnership tied to a particular site in the Bronzeville neighborhood, writing:

Although more than 100 communities exist in the United States, none are currently in Illinois. We are on track to change that!

The members of Concord Ecovillage were all excited when I visited last November about a particular site the group had optioned in West Grove, PA (a lovely small town near Wilmington, DE), but decided that people wouldn't be able to afford the ultra-green homes it envisioned for the community. Last Friday, though, they announced a new site, with a new community name, on 7.5 acres across from an 85-acre park, near downtown.

Read my blog entry here on cohousing.org for more about the announcements, with details and a little Cohousing Coaching interwoven, some Monday-morning quarterbacking about how they broke the news to some of their best prospects on their lists.

So: in just 48 hours, 3 communities taking big steps, getting serious, with sites and developer partnerships. Is this just an anomaly? A sign of market shifts? Coincidence? Time will tell. But we can hope that all this excitement and signs of progress is more contagious than the flu, ready to spread to your community, if you let it. Please share your predictions, reaction, excitement, and more in the comments.

Raines Cohen is a Cohousing Coach and Northern California Cohousing community organizer, living at Berkeley (CA) Cohousing. He is co-author of the new book, Audacious Aging.