Upcoming Public Presentation in Ramona, East Vancouver Events Recap, & Other Important Updates
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A Snowy Day at Nevada City Cohousing | |
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Ramona, CA Public Presentation
March 16th, 2023 6PM at Ramona Community Center
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"At Elliott Pond, you’ll see a lot of people. Our town square, with its restaurants and events, will be Ramona’s social center. It will also make Ramona a place to go to, not just go through."
Please spread the word to anyone you know (your email list) who might be interested in joining a new community in Ramona, CA, or just wanting to know more about cohousing.
Location: Ramona Community Center
434 Aqua Ln
Ramona, CA 92065
Date & Time: March 16th, 2023 @ 6:00 PM
For more information, please email jim@redleafvillage.com or visit https://elliott-pond.com/
We look forward to seeing you there!
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Other Updates in Cohousing: Table of Contents
February 2023
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- SB 9, ADUs, Affordable Housing, and Community
- East Vancouver Cohousing Getting-It-Built Workshop
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Antioch Continuing Education Class in 2023 DATE CORRECTIONS
- Home Available in Nevada City Cohousing
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SB 9, ADUs, Affordable Housing, & Community
An Opportunity for Creating Community within Single-Family Fabric
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Sixty-nine percent of housing in America is single-family housing—the epitome of separating people.
The new Senate Bill 9 (SB 9) in California encourages infill and more affordable housing development. This will result in a more walkable towns—making places close to each other and allowing commerce to prosper and community to flourish. SB 9 reintroduces a more historical type of land use where people fit into affordable housing—literally stitching it right back into the fabric of the town.
Nevada City, the town I live in, had 10,000-16,000 residents in 1900, according to historical records. And it was one square mile then. Now, it’s two square miles, and right at 3,000 residents. The town once had a hardware store, 2 drug stores, a grocery store, but now it has none of that. Single family housing took over, leaving the city underpopulated and unaffordable. Supply & demand is real.
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Now, thanks to SB 9, things can start to shift back. Imagine in this elegant little neighborhood you add a common house and clustered parking, and soon you’re well on your way to a high-functioning neighborhood. SB 9 allows owners to subdivide their lots into 2 lots. Then it allows each lot to add on an accessory dwelling unit (ADU), sometimes known as a granny flat or a mother-in-law unit.
These additional units will do a great deal for the neighborhood.
First of all, the kids who grew up in this town might be able to afford to move back to town. The housekeeper that I used to have would like to live in the town that she grew up in, Nevada City, instead of Roseville, which is 50 miles away. Almost all of our service workers, baristas, restaurant workers, and more, currently drive from considerable distances to work in town. So infill will also mitigate the ridiculous traffic into our town every morning, and lessen global warming.
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Some of the towns around San Diego have the same problem, so we are proposing a cohousing community in Ramona, San Diego County, that not only provides entry level housing there, but will also ultimately helps revitalize that charming town, both economically and culturally, as young people who work in the town will be able to afford to live and stay in the town.
I suspect that Nevada City will never have a population of 10,000 people again, but it might get to 3,500 someday which would be a step in the right direction when it comes to people having an affordable place to stay in our town and other suburban towns like Ramona, and many more.
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East Vancouver Cohousing
Getting-It-Built Workshop & Public Presentation Recap
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East Vancouver Cohousing's Kick Off Weekend was a big success!
Following the initial public presentation and task force meeting, they organized a Getting It Built Workshop with The Cohousing Company to lay out a clear set of steps that they need to pursue to get their new cohousing community built. This workshop took place over the weekend of February 11–12, and we are happy to report that it was a big success!
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We have 19 households attend the Getting It Built Workshop on Feb 11 and 12, where 16 have committed to proceeding to the next stage. These participants volunteered for various committees to advance the project: legal & finance, marketing, child care, membership & marketing.
We are in the final stages of negotiating a location for East Van Cohousing, and if this deal goes through, we plan to complete construction for move in 2026/2027.
The next step for East Van Cohousing is a Site Design Workshop on March 25 and 26, and a Common House Workshop on April 15 and 16.
| For more information, check out their website at: https://eastvancohousing.ca/ | |
Antioch Continuing Education Classes 2023
DATE CORRECTIONS
Now open for registration
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How to Address Homelessness in Your Town
Professional Development Certificate
Wednesdays Apr. 5 - 26, 2023, 9:30 – 11:30 am (Pacific)
In this 4-week course, Durrett will impart his decades of experience so that you understand the dynamics of addressing homelessness in your community. This course is for legislators, municipal employees, architects, planners, designers, urban volunteers, and all good citizens.
Sign Up Here
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Available Home in Nevada City Cohousing
Opportunity to live in Cohousing
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Looking out of my kitchen window, the first family that used to live in the house across my housing lane with 6 kids now has gone.
I am looking for great new neighbors. A family with kids that would love to live in a great high-functioning cohousing community.
If you are interested, please contact the sellers of the house:
Mikos: 540-400-5263 or Ellen: 916-203-5819.
To learn more about our cohousing community, please visit: https://www.nccoho.org/
We offer periodic tours. If you would like to visit us in person please contact Colleen at (831) 535-2997.
We prefer people who have been here and are familiar with cohousing.
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Books have played a major role from the beginning in terms of getting cohousing to this country and built in your town, starting with our first book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (The European Story). Bookstores normally play a key role in culture change in general, and cohousing is no exception.
Many groups have contacted the publisher (New Society Press and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) directly to get bulk discounts, and I find that successful projects get started when lots of folks do their homework. I usually need to give a dozen copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities, Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living and Cohousing Communities: Designing for High-Functioning Neighborhoods away to planners, banks, neighbors, mayors, new residents, local architects, builders, and so on—to give them context. It saves the group thousands and thousands of hours, dollars, and delays.
Cohousing is more than a sound bite; it is cultural pivot, and it takes folks doing some fun research first. Seattle and the surrounding areas have about a dozen cohousing communities largely because the bookstores in town have sold more than 1,000 copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities and the San Francisco area has over 20 cohousing communities because the book have sold more than 2,000 copies.
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