A while back Sustainable Industries reported on an innovative way of developing a retirement community. The Green Light Cooperative will develop The Sheldon with the help and input from its future tenants and operate it as a coop. A single building will thus manage to manifest elements of participatory development, crowdsourcing, and cooperative housing, while guided by a “for-profit social venture”.
It makes sense for an apartment or condo building’s tenants to have a say in the place where they’re going to live. The process allows the tenants to control in advance their costs, amenities, and unit features. More importantly, crowdsourcing the building also meets several criteria for creating a sense of community: belonging and identification, personal investment, influence, fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.
(The crowdsourcing aspect of participatory development was a major factor behind my joining the board of the motiveSpace Coalition.)
Participatory development and crowdsourcing in a project like this one lend themselves well to a cooperative structure. Confining the coop to a single building may help prevent some of the challenges that decentralized structures like cooperatives face, particularly in management. Once again, however, the crucial point is that as alternative structures co-ops work well for community building.
The final interesting aspect of The Sheldon is the developer’s self-declaration of being a “for-profit social venture”. In the past few days, I have been learning a lot about L3Cs: an L3C is “a low-profit limited liability company–a new form of LLC that combines the best features of the LLC with the social conscience of a nonprofit”. Oregon appears to be on track to join the 6 states that allow for the creation of “the for-profit with a non-profit soul” that is the L3C. Here’s to hoping the Green Light Cooperative and similar corporations will be able to become L3Cs soon, in Oregon and around the country.
Have you encountered any applications of cooperatives or crowdsourcing in development? Please share in Comments.
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Image credit: AsGood
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