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Posts Tagged ‘Brooklyn’

Brooklyn Cohousing: Creating Community in the Big Apple

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

The local paper in Brooklyn, New York has an article on Brooklyn Cohousing's efforts to start the first community in the New York burroughs. The Brooklyn group plans to buy an apartment building in the recently this recently trendy part of the city, sharing meals and common spaces within a condominium arrangement.

The article follows the standard "they're not hippies" line with an emphasis on the inherent cost of New York City condo ownership with the headline, "Wanted: Roommates with money".

"We want more out of life. We want more community. We were lonely and felt too isolated," said Alex Marshall, who started planning the first co-housing dwelling in the city with his wife last summer.

Alas, the 1970s are dead. This will not be a pot-smoking, patchouli-filled, free-loving, anything-goes compound.

"Take a commune and a condo, put them in a blender and this is what you get," said Ben Watts, a likely resident of the building, which will probably be in Park Slope, Prospect Heights or Windsor Terrace.

The article goes on to get some quotes from members of true communes from New York's past and finishes with a mildly humorous comparison of co-housing and communism noting that in cohousing the main source of conlfict is "Hectic, impersonal modern life" whereas in communism it is "Unequal ownership of the means of production."

For the real trash, see the commentary on the article at nymag.com where their only context to comment on the cohousing group is based on TV and movies and they snidely quip, "Something about a bunch of adults living as roommates seems inherently pervy to us."

Read the article on Brooklyn Cohousing.

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Artists evicted from Brooklyn ‘Commune’

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

While not a commune in the traditional sense, the residents of 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, NY describe their home as a kibbutz or commune. Unfortunately they were all evicted a few days ago due to the building being a fire hazard. Evidently the building was not even supposed to have residential spaces. Some claim the motivation was to move out the artists so the building could be turned into condos.

"We're trying to figure out how to organize ourselves as tenants to get to the bottom of what’s going on here," said tenant Lai Ling Jew. "We love our homes. This is a vibrant community we created."

Read about the community in the New York Times.

More info at the browsnstoner.com

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We happily link to the following organizations, all of whom share our strong commitment to promoting community and a more cooperative world:
Cohousing The Federation of Egalitarian Communities - Communes Coop Community Cooperative Sustainable Intentional North American Students of Cooperation