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Visiting Cohousing Groups

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The following pages and articles on this website are also tagged "Visiting Cohousing Groups":

  • A Tour is Worth a Thousand (or More) Words
    by Joani Blank, Swan's Market Cohousing
    October, 2004

    Six years ago while living at Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, I casually mentioned to a visiting tour group that I planned to offer my unit for sale within eight or nine months because I would be moving to Swan's Market Cohousing in Oakland upon its completion. The next day, a woman who'd flown up from Los Angeles to attend the tour called me up and offered to buy my unit for about $20,000 more than I was thinking about listing it for. She's happily living there still.

  • Virtual Tour
  • Visit Many Different Cohousing Communities First!
    By Diana Leafe Christian

     

    On August 1st, Fostermamas wrote in the "Researching Your Cohousing Community" Forum in this "Finding Your Community" Topic Room (http://www.cohousing.org/ma/findingforum/test):

    "As potential co-housing members we're constantly refining what factors are important in our cohousing search. Each visit to a potential community has given us more insight into what we're looking for in our ideal community.

    "After visiting our first cohousing community we decided that our multiracial family probably wasn't a good fit for a rural community.


    "After visiting our second community we decided we wanted an older established community that already had some of it's "kinks" ironed out.


    "After visiting our third community we decided we didn't want anything strictly urban as we are current urbanites looking for more green in our lives.

  • Tours
    Tour at Doyle Street
    Coho/US bus tour leader Joani Blank shows tour participants around the courtyard of Doyle Street Cohousing, an urban community in Emeryville, CA. (Photo by Evangeline Welch)

    A personal visit to a variety of cohousing communities offers you an experience that no photo, website or book can offer. To provide you with this opportunity, the Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US) sponsors daylong tours of cohousing communities in several areas around the nation.

    An experienced cohouser or cohousing professional will take you to visit five to seven communities. As you travel between locations on a comfortable bus, the tour leader will give participants a chance to introduce themselves, share general information about cohousing, answer questions, provide fact sheets and site plans, and prepare you for your 40-minute visit to each community.

  • Tour Leaders

    Joani Blank, Northern California tour leader and Tours Coordinator for Coho/US, has lived in cohousing since 1992 – eight years at Doyle Street Cohousing in Emeryville, CA, and since 2000 in Swan’s Market Cohousing in Oakland. Joani served on the board of Coho/US for eight years, and has visited 64 completed cohousing communities in the U.S. and Canada in the past 12 years.

  • Tours & Events
    Tour

    Tour participants at Harmony Village, CO (Photo by Evangeline Welch)

    Calendar
    Schedule of cohousing tours and events

    Cohousing tours
    Bus tours of cohousing communities. Learn more

    Workshops and seminars
    The Cohousing Association of the United States sponsors workshops facilitated by top cohousing professionals. Learn more

    Community events
    Cohousing communities and organizations across the United States offer many activities for people interested in or living in cohousing, and for communities in development. Learn more

    Submit an event

  • "Laser Beam" or "Information-Gathering": Two Ways to Plan Your Cohousing Visits
    By Diana Leafe Christian

     

    If you want to join a cohousing community, in my experience there are at least two ways to plan visits to likely existing communities and/or core groups of forming communities.

    One way is to visit only those that seem like likely candidates — communities or groups you’re actually considering joining, given what you know at the moment. Another way — which I highly recommend — is to visit those you know you’re interested in as well as other cohousing communities, whenever possible.

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