Community Blog

Ch Ch Changes

12/31/2020

After posting the blog entry below, many things have changed. By now, I have finished fixing up the house in Arlington to ready it for sale. My ex-wife and I put it on the market and sold it before the end of 2019. I had the option to take my time and actually sell it in 2020, but my intuition told me to get going and get it done before 2020, which I did.
I bought a condominium unit in Maynard, Mass. and moved there in September of 2019. That same month, my mother passed away (age 98), my purse was stolen, and I met a woman at her booth at Arlington Town Day ... with whom I began a romantic relationship soon after. (How ironic! After living in Arlington for 44 years and moving away, I find romance with someone who ... lives in Arlington!)
One of her three children has yet to graduate from high school, so, for the time being, she is staying there. Eventually, as her children will all be grown and living elsewhere, she would like to sell her house and move to another town. I am thinking of selling my unit by then and joining her to live together somewhere else.
But the question is, where? And in what kind of community, housing arrangement, and so on? Of course, by early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, so it's difficult to predict what opportunities we will have, going forward.

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How do we get started?

2/26/2018

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I would like to start with a brief history:

In the early 1970s, I was a student at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont. While there I lived in "cooking dorms" which had from 16 to 22 students each, with a kitchen and dining area large enough to feed everyone. We had a budget and arranged all our own meals. The social environment was very informal. If I wanted to go see the movie playing on the other campus (there were two), I would just go down the hall calling out, "does anyone want to come with me to see the movie on Greenwood?" I had a VW microbus, so I could take up 5 or 6 other people with me if they wanted to join me.

In the mid 1970s, after graduating, I moved to Arlington Mass., an inner ring suburb of Boston, and lived in a group house with four other people. I stayed there for 23 years, being the only housemate who was there all that time.

Right after I moved in, I was surprised by something. When each weekend came, my roommates all disappeared to go to activities and I was left there alone. What was I doing wrong? Simple. They had made plans, but I was so used to the spontaneous social environment at Goddard, I hadn't made any. The suburbs were a place of making plans mid week to line up activities on the weekend. Spontaneity was just not the way.

I became an active member of the community after awhile. I was elected to Town Meeting and served successive terms for a period of 16 years (1979 through 1995). I joined the food coop and served on the board and committees. I joined the League of Women Voters, became the founding president of a new non-profit community media studio (see acmi.tv), and volunteered with numerous other committees, groups, etc.

By the early 1990s, I found and joined a co-housing group. As is often the case, this group had existed for almost 10 years, trying to arrange for land. Well, in suburban Boston, land was at a premium! During my membership, land was located, and contracted for, but the neighborhood did not want co-housing there, so there was a lot of legal wrangling to go through. I participated in countless of hours of meetings, going over designs with the architect, contract language, making decisions about community policies, deciding who could [not] join us as a full member (a very painful process at one point), and so on.

Well before it was actually time to build anything, I had to drop out because I had decided to get married (I was single when I joined) and my wife and stepdaughter did not want to live there. So I resigned my membership and eventually got my deposit back.

My stepdaughter grew up and now lives on her own nearby. My wife and I realized that being co-parents was really our thing, and as empty nesters, we really had very different priorities in life. So we decided to separate and divorce. We agreed that my wife would receive half the value of the condo we co-own by the end of 2019. As I don't have that much cash available, I will have to fix up, clean up, move out, and sell this unit. As I write this, it's February 2018, so I have less than 2 years to do all that. Yikes!

Right now, I live with two roommates, one here for the duration, and a series of short term ones in the other room that's available. I've now lived in Arlington, Mass. for over 40 years! It's gotten expensive to live here and the culture of the place has changed over time.

So, it's time. Time for me to leave and get something more like a community going. But not just another co-housing village. I'm 67 and I don't want to spend the next 10, 15, or even 20 years just planning and building a place to live! I have better things to do with my life! (see my sister web sites for an idea of what I'm about). So what do I do instead? Think outside the box. Way outside the box! Outside the city apartment, outside the suburban house, even outside co-housing!

So that's what this blog is about. What can we cook up to do instead? Further blog entries here will explore that and other questions. Let's have a lively discussion!

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Ch Ch Changes

How do we get started?

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