Do You Buy a Beer or Rent One?

When I first heard this joke (30 years ago?) I thought it was outrageously clever. While I'm able to contain my guffaws over it now, it's nonetheless a good lead in to the compelling topic of renting vis-a-vis owning in intentional community.

• • •

Recently I facilitated six hours of meetings for a group that was exploring the issue of how best to manage renting unsold units. With the national housing market stuck in the doldrums, there are a number of communities who are scratching their collective heads about what to do with empty units—in some cases, a substantial number of empty units. While the idea was to sell them like hotcakes, in reality they've been selling like cold cakes. Which is to say, poorly.

While these units were not built to be rentals, that looks pretty attractive relative to letting them stand idle and having the existing membership all take an extra helping of interest payments.

Rental issues break down into two categories: those that are generic to renting at all; and those that are peculiar to renting a much higher percentage of the community's housing than was ever intended.

Generic Questions About Renting
o Will renters undercut our community's cohesion; to what extent will it lead to revolving-door residency with lukewarm involvement? Can we expect renters to evince the same level of enthusiasm and responsibility for the care and feeding of the community that we ask from owners?

My anecdotal response (based on first-hand reports from dozens of communities) is that if a group does a decent job of making it clear to prospective renters what it means to live in community, then the renters are just as likely to be productive and engaged members of the community as owners.

o Will we screen prospective renters with the same diligence that we do prospective owners, or will it solely be at the discretion of the owner?

While there almost certainly needs to be a streamlined process for evaluating renters (if a person wants to rent month-to-month, how can you justify a three-month courtship?), I think you'll be happier if you make the way you assess renters mirror the process used for owners as far as practicable.

o Will we extend membership rights to renters in the same way that we do buyers? If the rights of these two subgroups are not the same, in what ways will they be different?

I think the answer here should be yes (two classes of residents is a tough sell in a group committed to flat hierarchy and everyone having a say). In general, it works fine to extend to renters all the rights of membership, perhaps excluding only the right to block proposals involving long-term financial implications.

o In what ways will owners be responsible for backstopping the compliance of people who rent from them?

It tends to work well if the community is actively involved in the selection of renters, and expects the owner to be a "co-signer" on the membership agreement with the renter, such that the owner is expected to get involved in problem solving if there are issues with the renter as a member.

Additional Questions When Renting a High Percentage of Units
o At what point might the community be at risk of losing its core commitment if the dynamism of the owners is diluted in a seas of transients?

This is a nuance question and not easy to assess. The more cohesive the owners are, the more resilience you'll have regarding renters. Think pro-active.

o If the units are owned by the community, is the group better off self-managing the rentals, or hiring a management company?

Critical here is an assessment of whether the current membership has among it the skills, availability, and motivation to tackle this job—which will necessarily include jawboning with renters who start coloring outside the lines (falling behind in rent, skipping work assignments, getting too creative with how they "decorate" the wall, etc).

On the one hand, the community wants to screen propsectives for a good fit with the community, while a management company will be solely looking for warm bodies who can cough up rent payments. Further, the management company will almost certainly cost more dollars than what the community would compensate members to manage the rentals. There are essentially two reasons to select a management company: the skills set isn't present amongst available members, or no one with the skills has the time.

o How will you navigate the potentially tricky dynamic of simultaneously being peers (where all residents have an equal say on some issues, such as problems getting the common house cleaned or kids' scooters being left in the parking lot) and being landlord/tenant (where rights and responsibilities are paired, yet demonstrably unequal)? How can you be suitably firm with a renter who's behind in payments and then turn around and ask for their help in resolving tensions with a neighbor whose dog barks too much?

While tricky, this is not insurmountable. It requires clarity about how the relationship shifts as the circumstances change.

• • •

One of the most interesting aspects of cooperative problem solving is how to balance values that inadvertently are in tension on a given issue. Let me describe three pairs that come up in connection with the issue of renting.

Prudence Versus Trust
If the group is going to play an active role in screening prospective renters, how much information are you going to request about that person's background? On the one hand, you'd like to know if there are danger signs regarding a person' financial stability, health (both mental and physical), and perhaps their criminal record. On the other hand, you'd like to develop a trusting relationship and how might that intention be compromised by posing all these queries?

In essence, where is the middle ground around between not being naive and not being fear-based. This is not a trivial question.

Transparency Versus Discretion
One you start gathering information about a prospective member, to what extent should that information be shared with other members? How does your answer vary depending on what the information is? What's an invasion of privacy? What's appropriate information to pass along so that people can make an informed decision about risk? Do anyone promise you that community living was going to be straight forward?

Class Versus Diversity
Most groups have a core commitment to embracing diversity, but that doesn't mean without limits. If you allow renters that often translates into accepting people with less income or savings, and that often means people from a different socio-economic class. In turn, this often means people with a different upbringing and a different way of working with information and problem solving. Are you ready for that?

• • •

While I'm a big fan of renting, and I'm also a big fan of going down that road with your eyes open. While selecting renters is almost always more challenging than selecting what beer to drink, they'll both lead to a marked increase in pissing dynamics if you're not careful.

Rolling South

I'm typing from the upper deck of the southbound Coast Starlight, as we pull out of Portland (on a precious clear and sunny day!) to wend our way up the Willamette Valley. Eventually we'll snake through the Siskiyous and the substantial snow banks lingering in the passes leading to Chemult and Klamath Falls. (Yes, deep snow persists there into the second half of April and beyond.) In the dark, we'll begin our long descent into northern California, rumbling past Mt Shasta‚ which will literally be in view for hours—the mountain is that large and that isolated. In the pre-dawn, we'll chug into Sacramento in time to catch the early morning commuters. From there it's less than two hours to Emeryville and my first latte. If we're on time, I can get picked up before my host's 9 am yoga class.

I'll be in town for exactly one week, during which I'll visit with perhaps a half dozen friends, buttonhole potential sponsors for the FIC Art of Community weekend Sept 21-13 in Occidental, author some reports, attend a seder, soak in a hot tub or two, and launch Weekend I of the northern California version of my two-year course in Integrative Facilitation. It promises to be a full week.

Among other things, I'm looking forward to getting around the East Bay on foot, which is a terrific antidote to the sedentary life of a meeting junkie (and inveterate report writer). While I'm likely to rely on a car to get to and from the train station, there's a decent chance it'll all be BART and shoe leather in between. Yippee!

After a week of immersion in the perpetual spring of Berkeley, the following Monday I head for the barn, courtesy of two days on the eastbound California Zephyr. After 29 days on the road it'll be good to sleep in my own bed.

I left home in the cold mud of March and will return to the vibrant green of a countryside right on the cusp of summer. I will be returning just in time for morels and bluebells. Double yippee!

Any Portland in the Storm

I attended a gathering last night of intentional communities in the Portland OR area. Representatives of nine groups met for three hours over dinner and dessert to discuss ways to parlay the various beachheads of cooperation they've established at home into more robust options for the entire city. It's a cool model. Cooperative terra forming.

Like a lot of the US, Portlanders have been trying to weather the current recession, and the communities reported various struggles (as well as various successes). They came in the hope of seeing how the boundaries of cooperation could be extended out another ring, and how they could help each through hard times.

The FIC has talked about regional networks for years, trying to figure out how to promote them and support them without trying to steer them or control them. We're convinced that networks don't thrive unless driven by grass roots energy, which, by definition, a continental organization is not going to be able to supply. We can midwife networks, but not birth them.

How can we effectively encourage regional networks and then resist the temptation to cherry pick their best people in an effort to enhance the Fellowship—which also needs to grow? It's delicate.

While last night's meeting was all about planting seeds. The meeting itself was the germination of something first sown 11 months ago, when Board member Tony Sirna, Communities Editor Chris Roth, and I spent half a day visiting Cedar Moon (a community of 18 adults plus kids embedded in Tryon Life Community Farm, an educational project on the edge of town). This chance meeting immediately followed the FIC's spring organizational meetings—held at Daybreak Cohousing in Portland last May. Our hosts that day were Brush & Jenny, and in the course of our conversation about shoes and ships and sealing wax, we touched on the idea of those two dynamos putting out a call for a regional network of Portland communities, with FIC serving in the capacity of cheerleader and resource (we could, perhaps, occasionally supply out-of-town cabbages and networking kings).

I promised to remind Brush & Jenny of our May conversation whenever I'd next be in the area. My first chance was last December (when I returned to deliver process consulting to Daybreak as part of FIC's barter in exchange for meeting space and room accommodations at the organizational meetings), but Brush was in Ireland and the timing was off. Undaunted, I tried again when Trillium Hollow hired me to work with them the weekend of April 9-10. This time we clicked, and the April 13 soiree ensued. All I had to do was show up.

Like most hopeful starts, it's hard to say what will have legs. I thought Brush & Jenny did an excellent job of facilitating the conversation (making sure everyone spoke and the conversation was a balance of inspirational and practical), yet much will depend on who is inspired sufficiently to pursue any of the various ideas that were generated—website development, skills exchange, social events, cross-community facilitation guild, bulk buying, pooled insurance, joint marketing, car sharing, etc. I offered that FIC would be happy to offer our event-in-a-box package to support a Portland area community gathering (if that was desired and we were given sufficient lead time).

Toward the end of the evening, I added a cautionary note based on my three decades of community networking: it will make a enormous difference if they can find a way to compensate one or two people to be coordinators or administrators of the network's efforts. In my experience, if you rely solely on the dedication and goodwill of volunteers and groups to make use of fledgling connections and to keep information updated, it doesn't work that well. People are busy and work at home tends to trump opportunities and hopes that are out of sight. While you don't have to pay someone enough to send their kids to college, it needs to be a living wage if you want a significant fraction of that person's vital life force devoted to the cause.

While no decisions were made about that last night, they seemed to take this suggestion seriously. I'll be on the email list arising from this get together, yet have made no commitments to doing anything (excepting things like writing about what happened and responding if I'm asked for FIC's assistance). While the Fellowship can be relied upon to provide some second-hand clothes and moral encouragement, the baby will essentially have to grow up on local milk.

It'll be fun to see what develops.

Changing Stories

A good percentage of my work as a group process consultant entails helping a group get past some stuck dynamics. In these situations it's relatively common that there are stories about how one or more people in the group are essentially horns that only play one note.

That is, these people are identified with a certain position and the story in the group is that whenever this person contributes to the conversation it is solely to sound their one note (again and again). Mind you, that is not the story that these people have about themselves—while they probably will agree that they care deeply about the thing that everyone associates with them, their story will be that they also care about other things and the group distorts who they fully are.

While occasionally the position between taken by the individual is off the wall (insisting that all committees be staffed by seven-foot people with purple hair and a nose ring), most commonly the position (or the values underneath it) are perfectly legitimate, and that's what I'll be assuming for this essay. That is, the problem is not that the viewpoint is inappropriate, it's the obstinacy with which it's represented.

What's Going On?
This is almost always a systems issue, where everyone is playing a part. Typically, the person who is labeled as a one-trick pony contributes by coming across as a broken record. Worried that the thing they care so passionately about will not get its proper consideration, they insist on inserting the same comment (more or less) into any discussion where it might be remotely relevant.

While this may not literally be the only thing they add to group considerations, it might be the thing they do that's most noticeable (and irritating) and gradually two things happen: a) the rest of the group stops listening (they've heard it before); and b) the rest of the group develops a sense of despair that this person will ever manifest nuance in what they say or the ability to work constructively with alternate views.

Before long, this person gets pigeonholed and marginalized. People start thinking about how this person can be managed rather than how to include them in problem solving.

While the person may not even feel their position as strongly as they state it, they identify themselves as the champion of that viewpoint and a role they believe they must fill for the good of the group. In the extreme, this can take on the quality of a sacred trust, where their delivery comes across as messianic. While the person almost certainly is aware of the group's weariness at hearing yet another statement of their grooved admonition, they are curiously reinforced in their isolation, feeling it's their cross to bear. They are willing to pay the price of their isolation because they care that much about the values underlying their position (and the more people seem to resist hearing from them, the more doggedly they persist). In their eyes the group is constantly at risk of making a serious error in undervaluing the thing they care about, and their speaking up is meant to protect the group from that folly—even if the group doesn't fully grok how dangerously they're proceeding. They view themselves as misunderstood prophets.

Going the other way, the rest of the group—almost to a person—reports that they are fully aware of the one-issue person's viewpoint (you'd have to be deaf and blind to have missed it), yet are frustrated with this pattern for two reasons. First, the person does not seem to be able to digest that the rest the group has heard them (or they'd have ceased beating everyone other the head with their litany), and second, they do not seem to be able to bridge with differing viewpoints—they are perceived to be adamant about everyone coming to them. That is, they come off as non-collaborative, or uncooperative. As you might imagine, this is a particular sore point in cooperative groups (which is exclusively where I ply my craft).

When asked about this, the person will typically respond in one of two ways. Either they express fear that if they soften their language and become more malleable that this will encourage people to move further away from the position they care about so much (that is, it will be a tactical error), or they express surprise that they are viewed that way (it's not the story they have about themselves).

Most importantly, the rest of the group will tend to an analysis that the pigeonholed person is wholly responsibility for this dynamic. That is, the group will not see how they have actively contributed to this dynamic—how, in fact, they have placed this person in a box and won't let them out, all the while complaining about that person's unchanging behavior.

The Way Out
The good news is that if you recognize that you are in this pattern and have the will to discuss it, it can be reversed. Here's what I advise:

For the individual, they need to look for opportunities to make public comments that bridge to other people's statements that are not wholly in line with their cause célèbre. While I'm not suggesting that this person do anything out of integrity or betray their core values, it will behoove them to demonstrate publicly that they can see beyond their own issue and can work collaboratively. The individual needs to let go of the story that no one else gets it about their concern and to trust the group will not run them over if they're not constantly sounding their clarion call. Even if they're suspicious that this might not be the case, they need to test the waters.

For the group, it needs to look for opportunities to honor out-of-the-box statements from the pigeonholed individual, recognizing the breadth and caring that represents. It needs to let go of the story that the individual will always and only offer the same old input, and listen for nuance. The rest of the group needs to build bridges to the isolated individual, inviting that person join in the collaborative effort to solve problems.

Stories are perhaps the oldest form of social interaction; they're oldest human method for transmitting culture and information. They simultaneously have the potential to reinforce and limit; or to inspire and edify. The story I have about stories is that they are powerful and can be wonderful, confusing, innocuous, destructive, or all of the above. In groups, they work best when people are intentional about which stories they encourage to flourish. They work best when the stories celebrate compassion and reinforce relationships, rather than isolation and judgment.

For by their tales shall ye know them.

Sunshine in Portland

I've got sunshine on a cloudy day.
When it's cold outside I've got the month of May.
—the opening two lines of the Motown classic "My Girl" by Smokey Robinson

Back in 1984 I made a trek to southeastern Alaska. Mostly I was stayed with friends and explored the area in and around in Juneau, which is smack in the midst of a temperate rain forest. They average about 55 inches of rain annually and it was a dance finding sunny days sprinkled in amongst the liquid sunshine.

As impressive as that was, however, just a little bit down the coast is the town of Ketchikan, where it really rains. They average a whopping 150 inches of precipitation—nearly half an inch a day. There is a mountain overlooking the town and the locals say that if you can see the top, then it's just about to rain; if you can't see the peak, it's raining.

• • •

Twenty-seven years later. I'm in Portland OR, where I'll be working for the next 10 days with a trio of communities: Trillium Hollow, Columbia Ecovillage, and Daybreak. While the City of Roses has a reputation for rainy days, they don't get nearly as much accumulation as Juneau—Portland averages only 37 inches a year. Mostly they get mist and drizzle. Still, that adds up to a lot of cloud cover. Because most of their rain comes in the stretch November-February and then tapers off gradually in the spring, the natives are relatively starved for sunshine by April.

When I arrived yesterday, the skies were partly sunny. Today was even better: mostly sunny. Understandably, people wanted to be outside, or at least within sight of the sunshine. The past two days I've had about 12 hours of one-on-one (or one-on-two) conversations to get background for the plenary work I'll be doing with the whole community Saturday and Sunday. While no on blew off a date with me to play outdoors, people would position themselves so that they could look out a window.

Metaphorically, my job as a process consultant is to help bring sunshine into places where there's been a lot of rain, so this is all fitting together nicely. While it's tempting to play up the idea that I deserve partial credit for the upbeat change in the Portland weather ("Notice how the sun came out as soon as I arrived?"), I'll content myself with focusing on the weather we create inside the meeting room this weekend. If we can successfully navigate some stormy dynamics, people may not even notice the rain that's been forecast for the weekend.

When I was asked how I wanted the meeting room set up, I told my hosts that I wanted to be on the side of away from the windows, so that I wouldn't have to compete with the outdoor vistas for the community members' attention. While I'm fairly confident that I can be more stimulating than a steady drizzle, why take the chance?

Among other things, Trillium has asked me to demonstrate how to work authentically and constructively with conflict. They got some frozen dynamics in the group and my job, to paraphrase Smokey Robinson, is when it's cold inside to be the month of May. Even though it's only April, I'm up for the challenge.

Remembrances of Making Hay

One of Sandhill's long-time neighbors, Joe Neese, died March 31, succumbing to cancer at 87. I had written a eulogy for Emery Clark just nine days ago, and here it is already time for another. Yikes. I can only hope this is not one of those comes-in-threes kind of things.

Joe was both more social and more liberal than most of our neighbors, which led to his coming by more often to see how we were faring. In the first 10-15 years of Sandhill's existence, Joe was probably the neighbor that most took advantage of Sandhill's availability to provide short-term farm labor. In the summer we'd help bring in the hay…

As I type this, I can immediately image myself riding a wagon hitched behind his John Deere square baler. In the 90-degree days of June (perfect for making hay) I'd be wearing longsleeves (to protect my forearms from getting scratched by the grass stubble) and sweating profusely as I kept pace stacking bales of orchard grass & clover as quickly as they ka-chunked out of the chute. (I loved the geometric challenge of dense-packing about 70 square bales on a moving wagon such that they'd make it all the back to the barn without falling off.)

There was often a crew from Sandhill hired to haul the loaded wagons to the barn, where we'd pack hay to the roof joists. If we got ahead—and Joe & his wife Jacquelyn were out of sight—the crew might sneak off briefly to one his farm ponds and skinny dip in an attempt to wash off the dust and lower our core temperature to something below a simmer.

In the winter we'd help cut wood…

Joe had a monster wood-fired furnace in his basement that could burn four-foot chunks. Once or twice each winter, he'd gather a crew to help transform a pile of freshly cut logs into firewood, using a buzz saw powered by the flat belt pulley on a tractor. Sandhill would often supply a portion of the crew. Typically, there would be two pairs who would alternately manhandle poles up to position at the saw, where the wood would rest on a hinged table that could be pushed into the whirring blade. In addition to the sawyer (who would determine the rate of feed by how hard they pushed the table into the saw), another pair would catch and stack the firewood as it was cut.

I had the feeling at the time that these were the remnants of a dying culture, where farm neighbors came together to help each other out. Today, it's all about relying on technology to do the work of many, and farmers tend to ply their craft in isolation. I have strong doubts about how good this is from a quality-of-life perspective, and it's one of the main reasons Sandhill continues to harvest its sorghum by hand—to preserve the camaraderie of many hands working the land together.

• • •

Though other neighbors teased Joe about having a gloom-and-doom pessimism (about politics, the weather, and farm prices), he enjoyed life and always had a kind word to say about family and friends. That said, his spirit took a major blow when Jacquelyn passed away in 2002. Though he lived another nine years, I never had the sense that "batching it" suited him.

When we first moved to Rutledge in 1974, almost everyone called Joe "Junior." He had been named after his father and that made it easier for everyone to sort of who was being referenced when the two were both alive. However, as a group of 20-somethings we never met Joe, Senior, and it was uphill referring to a 51-year-old neighbor as "Junior"—and it didn't get any easier as time went by and Joe's hair grew thinner and grayer. Stubbornly, we persisted with calling him "Joe" and gradually, as memories of Joe, Senior faded, that's what others tended to called him as well.

Never quite trusting the vagaries of the weather, Joe's main cash crop was raising pure-bred Angus bulls. As the topography of northeast Missouri is mainly rolling hills, the land is better suited to grass than row crops, and it's terrific country for cow-calf operations (raising steers and heifers from birth to weaning). There is a steadier market for beef than for corn, and Joe was successful enough at raising bulls that he was able to increase his land holdings over the decades. A highlight of Joe's farming life occurred in the mid-80s when his son, Bob (there would be no Joe III), returned from doing missionary work in South Africa, built a house next door, and started farming with his father.

Just as he did with his father before him, Bob continues where Joe left off. Maybe Bob will stop by Sandhill one day and share with us why he's bearish about bulls—then we'll know he's his father's son and the circle will be complete.

Going to the Dogs

When I come to Las Vegas I rarely spend time on the Strip, but last night was an exception. I had a lovely evening with my son Ceilee, my daughter Jo, and her partner Peter. We started with a three-hour sake tasting at the Mirage (150 varieties!), and followed that up with a nostalgic visit to the Sahara, where we played some blackjack and roulette until midnight and my kids each pocketed a souvenir chip when it was time to cash out. The Sahara is one of the grand old ladies of the Strip (it opened in 1952), but the owners announced last month that they plan to close this icon May 16. We decided to pay homage to this classic casino whose time was coming to an end.

For a Vegas casino, 59 years old is ancient—not for its patrons, mind you, but for a business operating in the land of hype, where show-me-what's new is king and they overhaul the landscape of the Strip about as often as strippers change outfits (and with a similar degree of subtlety). The Sahara goes all the way back to the prime of Louie Prima & Keely Smith.

Sadly though, the glory days of the Sahara are long gone. There are many newer, glitzier hotels and casinos and the epicenter of the action has moved further south down Las Vegas Blvd. The Sahara had become a dog of a casino, and it couldn't survive the current recession.

Man's Best Friend
While many people who visit Vegas may consider casinos their best friend, I'm more of a traditionalist: I like dogs. Sitting next to me as I type is Zeus, a pit bull/boxer mix that Ceilee brought with him from Missouri when he and Tosca moved to the desert back in 2007. Occasionally he gets bored with my pecking away at the keyboard and suggests we go for a walk by placing his considerable muzzle on my thigh and staring at me hopefully (and when doesn't work he starts licking my ear).

Though I thoroughly enjoy my occasional forays to the Strip with Ceilee and Jo, the truth is that I happily spend way more of my time in town petting and roughhousing with my three granddogs (in addition to Zeus, Jo & Peter have two dogs: Yoshi and Zelda). When I stay at Ceilee's, Zeus is my regular companion. When I stay at Jo's, then I'm sitting on the couch next to Yoshi or Zelda.

[I can't help inserting here my fascination with these dogs' names. It isn't very often that you encounter a set of three arbitrarily named things and the one closest to the beginning of the alphabet starts with "Y."]

Growing up, my family always had a dog. In the years I lived at home there were only two. First Clipper, a Shetland Sheepdog (a kind of collie who left tufts of hair all over the furniture); then Beauregard, a Springer Spaniel (who was forever salivating on the windows looking onto the backyard, as he stared longingly at the birds and squirrels trespassing on "his" territory). In addition to their shared breed alliteration, these were both medium-sized dogs that lived more than 12 years, and were both well loved by the family. They were also dogs that had been bred for a particular purpose—herding sheep and fetching birds—that was spectacularly irrelevant to our suburban lifestyle.

It wasn't long after we started Sandhill Farm (back in 1974) that we had our first dog: Rochester. He was just a mutt that showed up one day and never left. He lived with us about 10 years (until the day that Mallie Phillips accidentally hit him with a pickup and Rochester died in my arms with a broken back). Though Rochester was essentially on outdoor dog, Annie would get me out of bed but letting Rochester into the house first thing in the morning. He'd race into the bedroom, jump onto the bed, and lick my face until I couldn't stop laughing.

While Rochester was the dog in my life that I bonded with most, we've had many dogs at Sandhill over the years. Mostly they're just pets, yet they help deter deer and rabbits from predating on our garden and that's a true benefit. It's wonderful that we can give our dogs so much room to roam (in sharp contrast with the 100-foot long fenced backyard that was all that was available to Clipper and Beauregard). The one strict behavior rule we have with our dogs is that they can't stay if they chase chickens.

Sandhill's current resident canines are Sammy and Biscuit, and they are loved just as much as their predecessors, though they have bonded more with other members than with me. I'm just on the road too much these days and the dogs that are closest to my heart today are the three I'm visiting this week in Las Vegas. Thus, whenever I make plans to come out here, it's not just to see my kids and my granddaughter—I am going to the dogs!