Surely we can find a way to live more lightly (and less expensively)
We had been optimistically following the development of Three Groves Ecovillage in Chester County, PA only to find that construction costs came in at the high end and the pricing of the units got out of hand. The project folded.
We had been optimistically following the development of Rocky Corner Cohousing near New Haven, CT only to find that construction costs came in at the high end and the pricing of the units got out of hand. The project went into bankruptcy.
Crazy that green eco-living homes have to wind up priced at $400K or more.
When the context is a special situation some developers and townships are able to think outside the box to keep it simple and inexpensive:
http://www.cohousingco.com/blog/2017/8/11/end-homelessness-now
I’ll bet a unit there is under $200K, maybe way under. An issue is that they have to have a “special situation” context in order to limit who is eligible — or else they would get swamped with applications.
Maybe the problem is: Even though demand for inexpensive-but-nice-and-also-green housing is huge, there is little profit to be made.
Maybe a Green government has to sponsor those kinds of projects as non-profit endeavors:
Let’s see some Green local officials team with some visionary simple-living pioneer developers to build cohousing communities where the homes are somewhere in-between the $200K cottages of Valley View Senior Housing and the $400K many-amenity cohousing communities that are over-influenced by affluenza standards.
