Why don't we live together?

[razz]

Casaverde does look like a good combo for co-housing. I wanted to see what the sale price or rent might be but neither is available at this time.
Regarding small houses with a yard - my house is 1300 sq ft and different people told me that both the house and yard were too small when I bought it in 2014. It seemed that then people wanted either a 1 BR townhouse condo with no outside maintenance or a larger house with a large yard. Today everything is selling for ridiculous prices. I love my little house in walkable distance to most of the services I need. I do need a car for visiting or weekly shopping but today delivery services like Amazon are making it a little easier to go car-free.
I wonder what changes the next 10-20 years will bring in housing?

[Teacher Terry]

Ours is 1400 sq ft with a average size yard. It was built in 1950 and the neighborhood is very much in demand. We got 400k. I love the neighborhood and very walkable. We are only a mile from downtown. I know many of the neighbors from walking the dogs. We only have 1 car garages so most people store stuff in there.

I need my own private living space and wouldn’t want to have my only private space a bedroom. Small houses communal living situations often have expectations of people sharing gardening, etc. I don’t want to be assigned chores at this point. I do know that I loved living in my condo and was there for 6 years.

[rosarugosa]

Gee.. again, I'm interested in how doubtful people are that human beings can co-exist! . I imagine that decision-making would be made the same way that town decisions are made, or HOA decisions are made, or even how State and Federal decisions are made.

The opposite of communal life is what I had in New Jersey--living as---le to belly-button with your neighbor but barely even seeing them for decades. Everyone has a different expectation and tolerance level for interactions with neighbors, but for me, I've learned through my VT experience that people can get along and work for common goals. Getting the right people might be like winning the lottery, but I'll take that chance. I'd have no problem navigating the idiosyncrasies of human personalities to get a wider "family"

Catherine: I was referring specifically to the info on their website about the consensus decision making model. It sounds so nice, but as someone who was involved in many team projects and endeavors in corporate life, I am somewhat skeptical. Here's an excerpt:
Consensus Driven
Alpenglow CoHousing is committed to ensuring all members are heard and all major decisions are made by consensus. Consensus decision-making is a creative and dynamic way of achieving agreement between all members of a group. Instead of voting and having the majority get their way, we use consensus to find solutions that everyone supports or at least can live with. In consensus decision-making, all opinions, ideas and concerns are considered. By listening closely to each other, we strive to come up with proposals that work for everyone.

[LDAHL]

Catherine: I was referring specifically to the info on their website about the consensus decision making model. It sounds so nice, but as someone who was involved in many team projects and endeavors in corporate life, I am somewhat skeptical. Here's an excerpt:
Consensus Driven
Alpenglow CoHousing is committed to ensuring all members are heard and all major decisions are made by consensus. Consensus decision-making is a creative and dynamic way of achieving agreement between all members of a group. Instead of voting and having the majority get their way, we use consensus to find solutions that everyone supports or at least can live with. In consensus decision-making, all opinions, ideas and concerns are considered. By listening closely to each other, we strive to come up with proposals that work for everyone.

Sounds like life there would be one long committee meeting.

[catherine]

Catherine: I was referring specifically to the info on their website about the consensus decision making model. It sounds so nice, but as someone who was involved in many team projects and endeavors in corporate life, I am somewhat skeptical. Here's an excerpt:
Consensus Driven
Alpenglow CoHousing is committed to ensuring all members are heard and all major decisions are made by consensus. Consensus decision-making is a creative and dynamic way of achieving agreement between all members of a group. Instead of voting and having the majority get their way, we use consensus to find solutions that everyone supports or at least can live with. In consensus decision-making, all opinions, ideas and concerns are considered. By listening closely to each other, we strive to come up with proposals that work for everyone.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I wonder how many "major decisions" need to be made. If it's one a year, like "should we expand our vegetable garden to include fruit trees?" I could deal with that. I couldn't deal with weekly or even monthly meetings. I could deal with having representatives speak for me, like an HOA board. I think the type of cohousing I would like would entail a minimum of joint decisions. I left the corporate world in large part because I hate meetings. I wanted to be left alone to do my own thing, so, yeah, it would depend on how much energy I'd have to put into consensus building. We have that here on the island, but there is maybe an hour a year spent on discussing joint goals.

[iris lilies]

Sounds like life there would be one long committee meeting.

yes! Haha, and this is the problem. I think of people who gravitate toward these living situations as those people who like meetings and drag them on forever, yammering so that they are “heard.” Not everything needs to be expressed, not everyone needs to be “ heard.”

Meetings exist to accomplish work.

[JaneV2.0]

When I took classes around the turn of the century, the fad was group projects. Most of us absolutely hated them--I certainly don't want to live in one.

[LDAHL]

yes! Haha, and this is the problem. I think of people who gravitate toward these living situations as those people who like meetings and drag them on forever, yammering so that they are “heard.” Not everything needs to be expressed, not everyone needs to be “ heard.”

Meetings exist to accomplish work.

I’ve always thought meetings were a hard way to arrive at decisions, but an excellent way to protect oneself from accountability and disperse blame for failure. It’s been said that none of us is as stupid as all of us.

One thing I miss about the military is that we were crystal clear about who was in charge and didn’t need to to endlessly discuss every little thing. It didn’t necessarily prevent dumb decisions, but it certainly cut down on wasted time in meetings. I worked for one guy who required everyone to stand up for his morning briefing. That mitigated against long- windedness.

I like being the petty dictator of my petty domain (recognizing my wife’s veto power, of course). It’s better to rule in Hell than “build consensus among the relevant stakeholders” in Heaven.

[razz]

I like being the petty dictator of my petty domain (recognizing my wife’s veto power, of course). It’s better to rule in Hell than “build consensus among the relevant stakeholders” in Heaven.

Funny! I feel the same way these days and the little dog does not get veto power, not often anyway.

[iris lilies]

Funny! I feel the same way these days and the little dog does not get veto power, not often anyway.

Boy though does our household ever cater to the immutable will of a dog, when it is identified as immutable.

you should’ve seen us dancing around our Bulldog’s latest “issue “in the past week. He is a dog with phobias.


All the sudden he cannot drink out of his water dish. There are reasons for that, it was because curtains were blowing around by his dish. SCARY! So I tied up the curtains so that they don’t blow around. It now looks like crap but that doesn’t matter, he’s ruling on this one. Still after that he was afraid and wouldn’t drink and we had to move the bowl...still not drinking. DH then swapped out the stainless steel water bowl for an entirely different one made of glass.

That seemed to do the trick.