I love co-housing in principle, but how I see it being developed in my city, makes me loathe it. In urban areas most of the co-housing I see is built by developers who are doing their best to use co-housing as an initial invader to gentrify predominately black, latino, immigrant, and working class neighborhoods.
I live near one of these gentrification oriented co-housing projects, where working class and minority housing was removed to put a high end "eco-freindly" nearly gated pocket neighborhood. I watched the development being built, and they used terrible cheap building materials like roofs of 15 year rated shingles. After putting cheap roofs on they put solar on top of those inferior shingles, but made the insides and cosmetic fixtures look nice. Can't wait to see how they look 15 years.
Only one child from that whole development goes to the neighborhood school a 1/4 mile down the street, but which has 55% non English as a first language students. The co-housing development is, of course, all white.
The whole situation makes me ill, and this same jerk of a developer bought up several more homes, and is about to start building another one across the street from the first. The city keeps talking about this creep like he is some hero, but he's just another A-hole looking to profit from people wanting co-housing, while destroying minority and working class neighborhoods.
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I love co-housing in principle, but how I see it being developed in my city, makes me loathe it. In urban areas most of the co-housing I see is built by developers who are doing their best to use co-housing as an initial invader to gentrify predominately black, latino, immigrant, and working class neighborhoods.
I live near one of these gentrification oriented co-housing projects, where working class and minority housing was removed to put a high end "eco-freindly" nearly gated pocket neighborhood. I watched the development being built, and they used terrible cheap building materials like roofs of 15 year rated shingles. After putting cheap roofs on they put solar on top of those inferior shingles, but made the insides and cosmetic fixtures look nice. Can't wait to see how they look 15 years.
Only one child from that whole development goes to the neighborhood school a 1/4 mile down the street, but which has 55% non English as a first language students. The co-housing development is, of course, all white.
The whole situation makes me ill, and this same jerk of a developer bought up several more homes, and is about to start building another one across the street from the first. The city keeps talking about this creep like he is some hero, but he's just another A-hole looking to profit from people wanting co-housing, while destroying minority and working class neighborhoods.
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