October meeting: Cooperatives for housing and equitable development

[Garlynn Woodsong]

Hi folks,

Who:

This email is going out to three groups:

• The Portland sub-chapter of the Cascadia chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism
• The Portland Small Developers Alliance
• The Oregon Cooperative Housing Network

It is being cc’d to a fourth group:

• The Cascadia chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism

When:

I’d like to convene a joint meeting during the second week of October.

Please let me know if you are interested, but UNABLE to attend a meeting at the following dates & times:

• Monday, October 11th: 6-7:30pm
• Wednesday, October 13th: 6-7:30pm
• Thursday, October 14th: 6-7:30pm

I will schedule the meeting for the date/time that presents conflicts for the least number of folks.

What:

The topic of the meeting will be multi-stakeholder cooperatives for housing and equitable development.

This meeting is not intended to be a summit or a policy discussion.

Instead, it’s meant to build participation in a federated cooperative and/or local cooperatives within that federation, in order to bring real solutions to market for our housing and inequality crisis.

Why:

Frankly, I think the time for navel-gazing has passed, and it’s now time for action. Over the past two years, a number of us have identified cooperatives as one of the most promising paths forward, and one that has very little current housing market penetration in Oregon, especially within the Portland region. 

For the urbanists and developers especially, this is a critical point: currently, it basically does not pencil to bring a new-construction multifamily rental building to market as a profit-dependent endeavor in most areas of Portland; while such a development might pencil as a condominium (for-sale multifamily), the fear of construction defect liability has scared basically the entire local development industry away from this exit strategy. If you can’t build multifamily to rent, and you can’t built it to sell, then why would you build it? Yet, we’ve pinned the future of our region on developing multifamily, essentially, so that we can grow up rather than out.

Cooperatives thus provide a path forward to continue the work towards achieving our regional vision, one with multiple co-benefits, including the opportunity of multi-stakeholder cooperatives to provide not just housing, but also economic opportunity with reduced risk.

Where:

We will meet virtually, to reduce barriers to participation.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

cheers,

~Garlynn

-- 
                O
        O           ...let's go do
    O                        something
  O                              i n t e r e s t i n g
O                 .garlynn.g.woodsong.
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[Garlynn Woodsong]

Hi folks,

(Re-sending this to pick up folks who I just realized were missing from, and are now added to, the OR Co-op Google Group).

[barbaranelson0927]

Monday or Wed. is good