A Tour is Worth a Thousand (or More) Words
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.
Last summer, a group of eight tired but happy participants of a tour I led in Northern California sat together in Swan's common house while my co-leader and I were tidying up the meeting room. Without any encouragement from us, the tour participants spontaneously formed a new core group. A few weeks later they combined forces with a few members of an inactive group in the area. It now appears that two new communities may arise out of the newly invigorated East Bay Cohousing.
Just last summer some short-term renters here at Swan's invited a friend over for an afternoon visit. Later that evening they all shared a common meal with Swan's residents in the common house. The friend hadn't heard of cohousing before her visit that day, but a few weeks later she traveled to Arizona and decided to purchase a unit in a cohousing community there.
Words don't hold a candle to the real thing
Those involved in cohousing know the difficulty of describing what cohousing is to those who are unfamiliar with it. We're usually busily explaining what cohousing is not. No, cohousing communities are not "new millennium communes." No, we are probably not what you imagine when you hear the phrase "intentional community." No, we do not screen out people who do not share our religious, political or social ideology. No, we don't all live in a shared house. No, we don't share all our meals in a community dining room. No, we're not really like a kibbutz. And on and on.
Sure, we'd rather be positive, telling folks how it really is to live in cohousing. If we're lucky we get to explain that unlike many other kinds of collaborative housing, each household in cohousing has a complete residence with its own real kitchen. We tell others that we're heavily involved in planning for the place where we will be living so that it meets our needs and desires. We explain that we self-manage and mostly self-maintain our communities. We talk about how we use consensus as a process to make decisions and nurture our sense of community. And we emphasize that those who want a lot of privacy can have it in cohousing.
Those of us who already live in cohousing communities will tell you, however, that these explanations don't hold a candle to the impact of showing friends, relatives and other visitors around our communities. And folks who have visited a friend living in cohousing (especially if they've shared in a common meal) or those who have attended one of the Northern California,
Mid-Atlantic or Massachusetts cohousing tours universally come away with a good sense of how things really are where we live.
Tours often attract likely buyers
As the tours coordinator for the Cohousing Association of the United States (Coho/US), I have led or co-led seven or eight of the Association's cohousing tours in northern California plus two in Colorado. We also hope to start regular tours in Colorado and in the Seattle area in 2005. Most people who participate in these tours are folks who are curious about living in cohousing communities and want to learn more about them. The tours also usually attract a few people who are already members of a forming group or a community being developed, a couple of professionals (developers, planners, builders or architects) who are considering working with a cohousing group, plus a graduate student or two.
Some of the participants who are considering living in cohousing are looking far ahead because they don't expect to afford to become homeowners in the near future. Many others, however, say they've been looking for something "just like this" for years, and several report that they would be willing to sell their current residence and move into cohousing "right away" if a unit of the right size and price were available in one of the communities they visited.
Mini-workshops on the bus prepare visitors for site visits
The Association's bus tours always start with one of the longer drives (1-2 hours). During this time the leader gives participants a chance to introduce themselves, shares some general information about cohousing, answers questions, raises topics for participants to discuss with their seatmates and prepares them for observations they will want to make during the 45-minute visit to each community.
We also distribute a fact sheet and site plan before arriving at each site. We encourage participants to pay attention to the different physical aspects of the community -- site layout, orientation of private houses to the common house, parking placement, building characteristics, gardens and open space -- and look for what works well (and what doesn't).
We also encourage questions to the community hosts and tour leaders. Most participants want to know what it's really like to live there. How do you structure common meals? How much is the common house used and for what activities? How do you resolve conflict? How onerous are the meetings? What do you like best (and least) about living in cohousing?
Tour participants also receive a packet of flyers announcing the existence of forming groups in the area, "ads" for units available for resale and promotional pieces for area communities that are seeking new neighbors for projects in development or under construction. Because some participants are from out of the area (even out of state) and everyone on the tour has friends and relatives in other parts of the country, tour leaders also provide information about cohousing nationwide as requested.
By now you can probably see how tours help to market cohousing by engaging people fully with the process, introducing them to others with whom they might wish to collaborate and alerting them to the realities of finding a site, building and then living in cohousing.
Touring tips for individual communities
Full-day regional tours can work only if there are at least four (and up to seven) cohousing communities in fairly close proximity. Another option is to make it easy for visitors to tour your individual community. Here are some suggestions:
- Prepare a fact sheet for your community with a simplified site plan printed on the back and have a stack of them available at all times in the common house. If you wish to use the association's template, please tours [at] cohousing [dot] org.
- Schedule regular monthly or bi-monthly visiting or tour days. Two hours on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon seems to work
best and is the easiest to "staff." Send notices of your community's ongoing tour schedules to the editor [at] cohousing [dot] org for publication in our magazine's news section. Be sure to include time, date and contact info, including name, email address and phone number.
- Place one person in charge of visitor management or organize a committee of several members who enjoy hosting visitors. Communicate with each other from time to time about visitors who are coming through and whether you feel you are being responsive.
- Notify your community by email or on a bulletin board whenever you schedule a group of more than two or three visitors, especially if you don't have regularly scheduled tours or visiting days. For a large group, you should plan well in advance to avoid conflicts.
- Grab a cohousing toddler and take him or her with you and your visitors on a walk around your neighborhood.
- Update your listing on the Community Directory on our website and include the name, email and phone number of the contact person. This individual should be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about cohousing. We recommend rotating the contact person to avoid burnout, and to provide a variety of different perspectives on the community over time.
- From time to time, invite a guest to stay for a common dinner or to sleep in your guest room for a night or two.
- Share what you know about the cohousing movement in North America, show a copy of the book Cohousing (doesn't every common house have a copy handy?) to visitors and encourage them to subscribe to this online magazine and to utilize the website if they aren't already doing so.
Related pages: Visiting Cohousing Groups, Marketing
