Dear Folks,
Is that the sound of bulldozers I hear outside, beginning the sitework and foundations of the Cobb Hill Cohousing complex?
Nope.
It could be the sound of our Kubota tractor out at the end of the CSA garden, where Stephen is turning in oat cover in preparation for fall veggie planting. It may be the sound of my dear cousin Eddie, visiting for a month from Kansas, pounding as he tries to fix various long-dysfunctional Hunt house door latches. Maybe it’s Roger Hunt’s lawnmower — he lives in the trailer and likes to do the mowing for us. (“Heck I got nothin else to do!”) You might hear Robin Shute’s tractor over at the Curtis place, tedding the hay he cut yesterday. Lots is happening around here. But none of it is new construction.
Actually, we’ve made great progress toward that goal in the last month, but everything is taking longer than we thought. As usual.
We ***DID*** get a commitment letter for our bank construction loan! That happened only last week. Chittenden Bank diddled and questioned and backtracked, but did come through for $1.25 million, which, we hope and pray, will be just what we need. The terms seem to be livable-with. Because we fall under their Socially Responsible Banking Fund we pay 0.5% less than we would otherwise (10% instead of 10.5%, which doesn’t strike me as much of a major leap toward socially responsibility). Our best advocate within the bank said we are the first project ever to hit every one of their socially responsible criteria at once — affordable housing, sustainable agriculture, small business, green construction, and community-building. I’m glad that they feel that way, because we’ll probably have to go back to them for mortgages and business loans.
It’s funny; the bank has been our symbolic bugaboo throughout our planning process, partly through our own fearfulness and partly through warnings from other cohousing groups. “You can’t have composting toilets; the bank will never allow it. The bank won’t go along with bylaws that require consensus. The bank won’t permit you to sell development rights on all the rest of the land.” And indeed the bank questioned us closely on all those points. Other banks have downright refused loans to other cohousing groups, or forced them to change design.
But — let’s celebrate a bit here — we got all our outlandish ideas through this bank. We didn’t have to compromise anything. It took a year of careful talking, and answering questions, and updating spreadsheets, and showing plans, and dropping by brochures about our strange wood-burning furnace (just one furnace for 22 homes) and our strange composting toilets (which will be Phoenix, which won the bid over Clivus). But we got the loan. Assuming that all goes well through our construction, so the bank doesn’t lose its shirt on us, we should have paved the way for the next folks who come in talking about cohousing and green building and such.
I have to keep reminding myself that all this educating — of bankers, regulators, insurance agents, lawyers, designers, suppliers, etc. — is part of the work, worthwhile in its own right, the point of the exercise — even if it raises delays, expense, and blood pressure. Pioneering is just not as easy as walking down a well-traveled path.
So now all we’re waiting for is a guaranteed-price contract with our builders (which is in part waiting for some final decisions by us) and quite a bit of legal work (the lawyers have only seen this coming for 6 months) and our permits, our permits, our ever-present friggin’ permits. We have an additional Act 250 hearing on Tuesday over the matter of the screening from the one angry neighbor. Otherwise Act 250 is finished — we have our water and wastewater permits, the biggies, at last. We’re in a public comment period that is drawing comment only from that one neighbor. (Amazing, actually, when you figure that we have about 40 neighbors within sight.) We’re still waiting for the final Act 250 documents and the very last permit — the labor & industry one that has to do with building codes and fire safety. We are very much hoping that all this will be accomplished by August 3, our next target date for groundbreaking.
Then all our troubles will be over, right?
One of the sweetest things that happened this month was that virtually the whole Cobb Hill community — all the 16 pledged-in families plus quite a few of the interested potential members — were together on the land for 4 days. The Kentuckians, Hal and Susie, had literally just pulled in with their moving van. (They’re renting nearby till their house is built.) Both families from California were here. Beth and Phil were even able to bring, for short stretches, their new Nora Elizabeth, less than a week old.
Our 8 kids between the ages of 2 and 6 all got to know each other for the first time and quickly created the scenes we had always envisioned. Kids chasing kids across green lawns. Kids chasing frogs down at the pond. Kids in the peapatch, stuffing themselves. Kids patting dogs, kids watching chickens (and trying to walk like them), kids down on the floor with Leggo trains, kids in their pjs hearing a story from one parent, thereby releasing other parents to help with dinner or attend a meeting.
The weather was crystal-glorious. The adults enjoyed being together too.
We (mainly Marsha, actually) managed to keep meals flowing as multiple meetings also flowed. We had a land-use meeting to look at our spiffy new GPS-based computer map of our tree stands. We had a Home Show with various vendors setting up displays of lights and doors and windows and cabinets and stoves and sidings for us to choose from. We had our normal day-long monthly meeting, in which we finally broke through to consensus on the difficult question of determining the re-sale value of our homes (not quite an equity cap, more like profit-sharing with the community). We met with Jeff our architect to talk about the inside design of the commonhouse. We had a tough evening meeting to talk through money matters in general and the principle of generosity as it does or does not play out through our community.
We had a pot luck dinner for our neighbors — the place was packed. We had weeding parties in the CSA garden. We did our best, quietly and individually, to embrace our dear Phil and Judith, who had just lost a daughter in a tragic car crash. (So strange and awesome for the community to lose a daughter and gain a daughter within one 10-day period.) We sang. We made a circle on the land to bless it as it is about to receive the intrusion of our houses. We ended with another ceremony on the land and a bonfire.
It began to feel like really living together, and it felt good. I thought, as I looked around the circle, “Wow! I LOVE these people!” We also had some lessons to learn. I think we all had to retreat from time to time; it was just too intense to handle all those human interactions at once. I learned that in a community of this size I will NOT be able to join in, or even monitor, everything that’s going on all the time.
And we still have six families to add! I think we know for sure the next two, who were also present for some or all of that marathon meeting. Good newcomers keep showing up. We expect to fill very fast now.
The community was not the only thing blooming this month — the land was too. It has gone on being a cool, wet summer, which the peas and lettuce and kohlrabi and I find absolutely delightful. (The tomatoes and corn aren’t so sure, and the melons and cucumbers positively hate it.)
My long flower garden out front is in July glory, bursting with daylilies and beebalm and phlox and delphinium and echinacia and pansies and petunias and nepeta and Oriental lilies and stock — with dahlias just about to pitch into the mix. It’s a riot of color and the first thing you see when you arrive here. I’m beginning to think of it as the “welcome garden.”
Marsha’s and my big garden to the south of the house is doing amazingly well, given that we started in the spring with a solid mass of witchgrass. The two long rows of peas just won’t quit. (Who PLANTED all those damn peas anyway?) Eddie and I picked and froze seven quarts just yesterday — if you’ve even shucked your own peas, you know that’s a LOT of peas! And it’s two weeks into the season; it follows quarts and quarts that Marsha and I have done. Our newly planted strawberries are just sending out runners. The potatoes are blooming, as are the calendulas and bachelors buttons and sunflowers. Marsha is erecting a big arbor (I call it “Marsha’s Stonehenge”) for the grapes and kiwis, which are beginning to need to climb on something. For an overambitious huge garden in a completely new place, the whole thing looks pretty good.
Kerry and Stephen’s six acres (SIX ACRES!!!) of flowers and veggies got a great leg up from the community weeding jags, and more recently from five days of help from 11 kids from Farm & Wilderness, a great camp in Plymouth, Vermont. Here’s a nice story. Mitch Hunt, who grew up on this farm, is now the farm director at Farm & Wilderness. He’s also become a friend of ours; he stops by to jawbone about farming with Stephen and Kerry every time he comes up to visit his folks. He arranged for the 11 kids to come camp here. He started them off with a history of the farm and a tour of its special places. Then the campers and their counselors helped out for a week.
They camped high on the hill, with impeccable manners about fires and messes. During the day they weeded and weeded. (Eleven kids can get down one of those “18-mile rows” a lot faster than I can!) They helped repair stone walls. They even got a start on the massive job of painting the barn, energized by African drumming from one of their counselors. One night they came down for dinner here, and Stephen and Hal gave them a talk about Cobb Hill and our plans for the farm and organic farming and the larger agriculture picture. Their last night they came for an ice-cream party and a movie about farm life. It was a great experiment; enthusiasm on all sides; we’ll do it again; it’s just the kind of thing I had hoped would happen here, happening already!
Never a dull moment.
Marsha and I took a neat excursion to Irasburg VT, way up in the Northeast Kingdom, nearly to Canada, where I had to speak at the annual meeting of the Vermont Land Trust. I hate speaking, but I like the VLT and I was happy to get a chance to hear the great barn restoration expert, Jan Lewandoski, talk about the old round barn (85 feet high! holds 26,000 bales of hay!) on the Robillard Farm, where the meeting was held. This is one of many farms now protected in Vermont — almost 10 percent of the active farmland has permanent conservation easements. The land trusts continue to work to increase that number. Cobb Hill will add 250 acres soon.
I also had to go to Burlington last week to speak at a convention of all the energy regulators of the 50 states, plus the alternative energy and efficiency people from DOE, HUD, EPA and other federal agencies. I told the story of Cobb Hill — one of the few times I’ve gotten to do that — a subject upon which I can be relied upon to be passionate. It was a great opportunity to think about the messages we might want to give to regulators (ha!). I made a pitch for one of my most urgently desired projects, a terrific monitoring system, so we can monitor the major throughputs of Cobb Hill — electricity, water, heat — in order to provide instant feedback to all residents and an operating record over time of how we’re doing.
Wouldn’t you like to see on a website exactly how much electricity Dana’s apartment is drawing at every moment? Can’t you just envision the cool digital display at the entrance to the commonhouse, where you can see every family’s moment-by-moment water use? Plus their monthly and yearly totals? And how that is affected by babies with diapers or teenagers who take long showers? Wouldn’t you just love to be one of those families with throughputs on display? Do you think it would affect your behavior?
As you might imagine, some of my Cobb Hill colleagues are a bit edgy about this bright idea, but so far there’s no problem — we can’t afford all the meters (and digital downloading software and web design) we need to do it. I applied to EPA for a grant that went nowhere. I’ll try again this fall. Maybe in my Burlington speech I moved the hearts of some of the Washington bureaucrats who were there. A knot of them formed around me after the speech, shoving their cards at me, so I have some avenues to explore.
Well, it’s time for me to go write some more grant proposals and hassle the lawyers. My advice to you is, if you ever want to join a cohousing project, find one that’s already built.
Love,
Dana
