A question of Ownership

[NB – this might be a little stream-of-consciousness-y. Sorry]

I’ve been wrestling with the question of ownership for a while now. It has been bugging me for a long while, but I am struggling to put my finger on exactly what and why…

Ownership is critical to any community or communal activity. How much are we ‘bought in’? Do we see this place, this activity, this group as ‘ours’? It becomes especially pertinent when we start talking about money and property – something that we can’t avoid in this endeavour. A group of people buying a property or piece of land have to own that land somehow – but I’m beginning to think that the ‘how’ is quite critical to how the group view the endeavour; and themselves.

I’m not sure how clear I’m being; so lets start with an example: Co-housing is a really interesting idea, one that I’ve found quite fascinating since AJ first told me about it. Recognising that Western, Modern society makes us highly individual beings – but still with communal needs and desires – co-housing creates a ‘community’ of private spaces around common, communal facilities. Basically, in most of the examples I’ve seen, that is private dwellings arranged around common land, with common cleaning and eating facilities, and arranged common activities. Residents ‘own’ their private space and a ‘share’ of the common spaces; and commit in principle to eating together once or twice a week and entering into communal activities from time-to-time.

While this is a neat solution in many ways, I end up asking myself “how communal is co-housing, in reality?” To me, it doesn’t seem to be many steps removed from the traditional village: Everyone has their own private spaces and lives, but gathers around the Green and the Village Hall once in a while. Well, great. But is that really community?

As we’ve talked about before, I’m an introvert, and I need private space – places of refuge – in any community we go on to create. But I look at co-housing, and it seems lacking to me. It doesn’t seem intentional enough. Communal enough.

Now, there are philosophic questions on co-housing that I don’t want to go into now. But, if you’ll permit me, lets unpack it from an ownership perspective. Co-house-ees own their little units, their private spaces. The collective ownership is of communal spaces and facilities that are a step removed from the private ones. We are talking primarily of psychological ownership at the moment, but in most cases it stands true for monetary ownership too. Primarily this is individuals holding on to their individuality, and consenting to share a bit more of their time than the modern average.

So, I guess my question is this: does an intentional community need to have collective ownership to be really intentional? Does the property, even the private space, need to be owned by the group together for there to be a proper sense of togetherness? That is not to say that you wouldn’t have psychological ownership of your own private space – the ability to put up paintings without common consent and to shut the door and feel it is ‘your’ space. Just that I am wondering if private ownership – even of sections of a whole – precludes any real sense of common endeavour.

I am interested in creating something that will, eventually, hopefully, have a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. A sense of communal identity and purpose that is more than just a bunch of individuals living under the same (or nearby) roof(s). Surely that only works if people are bought into a sense of common endeavour and ownership? And, if so, doesn’t that preclude individual ownership?

Now, obviously this causes problems. If we are looking to buy property, we need a way for people to invest, and a way for people to leave. We have to think seriously and realistically about this. But this is (one of) the reason I think values and vision are so important: because if you want someone to buy into something larger than themselves, it has to be something they can believe in. And people do invest in things they believe in.

I hope this blog/article/whatever goes someway to explaining some of my gut reaction to the question of private ownership in our community activity. I’m still exploring this; still reading about finance options, about what other communities have done and the decisions they have made. Still questioning myself and wrestling with my thoughts. As part of that continuing process, I’d be interested in hearing more of yours…

Thanks for reading

andy