Dealing with Money

The December 3 Webinar of Katie McCamant’s “Investing in Sustainability: Financing Cohousing” was very well received by its attendees. In answering evaluation questions at the end of the webinar, 92% of the respondents rated the webinar content as Excellent or Good. And 88% said that they would Absolutely or Very Likely recommend a webinar to other people.

A glance at a detailed map of U.S. cohousing communities would show that most of us are living in areas of relatively high property values: on the coasts, in college towns or on the outskirts of high-tech growth centers. That’s one reason why making cohousing affordable to the widest possible number of people has been of intense interest to prospective community members throughout the history of the cohousing movement.

These are some of the elements to consider working on in the first months you spend together. This assumes you have brought together a core group of at least two or three households. Three or four households is even better.

As the completion date of a new cohousing community nears, everyone is usually so preoccupied with construction schedules, escrow, packing, moving and so much more that it can come as a shock that it’s also time to plan how the community is going to do its bookkeeping and budgeting.

This is a historic moment on Planet Earth. Life as we know it is about to change dramatically as global climate change accelerates, and as we reach “Peak Oil,” when demand outstrips supply for fossil fuels that are increasingly hard to extract. As we look toward a future in which our traditional energy sources are severely depleted, cohousing neighborhoods have an increasingly important role to play in modeling a greener lifestyle.