Author Archives: terry
HUD’s $12.8 million grant requires sweat equity
HUD’s Self-Help Homeownership Opportunity Program (SHOP) has a grant totaling $12.8 million and has extended the application deadline to July 15th. It calls for applicants to “contribute significant amounts of sweat equity.” Right now, for many of us, sweat is what we have in abundance. From HUD’s website: SHOP awards grant funds to eligible national [...] Continue reading →
Home sharing opportunities – finding or creating them
The fertile soil of the economic collapse and housing crisis compels us to think about new ideas that, in fatter times, would have been unthinkable. The distinction between the type of sharing and the type of ownership is important. Shared arrangements could include PH/H – Professional Homes managed by Professional Homemakers. The household pivots around the [...] Continue reading →
So, you think your grandma can’t get a job, huh?
If you’ve had the privilege of living in a well managed home, you know that life is sweeter when dinner is on the table at 6:30 and you take leftovers for lunch. We rarely acknowledge the financial, psychological and time saving benefits of living in a well organized, gracious home. Indeed, it was one of [...] Continue reading →
Housing Mixers & Worker Co-ops Address the Housing Crisis
Dysfunctional families are one of our thorniest and most fundamental societal problems. If we stabilize the family culture, we have a shot at stabilizing society. Securing affordable housing is a major stress because today’s economics make new construction or rehabbing existing construction unaffordable for low and moderate-income people. Since affordable housing is not in the [...] Continue reading →
Range of Home Sharing Options
We face many crises today — housing, food, nutrition, education, isolation, care for children, the elderly and health care. Improving our housing model could realistically ameliorate, to some extent, many of these challenges. Given the premise that our predominate housing model–single person / single family homes–may not be ideal for all demographic groups, New Community [...] Continue reading →
Nurturing communities from the ground up
Using break through technology, face-to-face neighboring, communities can strengthen themselves from the ground up, a potential game changer. Community Mixers and Housing Mixers have the potential to empower communities to create housing, jobs, good food and strong communities from within. Every community is rich in resources – people who know how to fix things, nurses, early childhood experts, computer [...] Continue reading →
How Crazy is That – launch party postponed
I am postponing the How Crazy is That? launch party because even after all this time, I’m still doing this mostly by myself in my spare time (none), with my spare cash (double none). I never intended my passion for community building as a solo effort and I welcome anyone who gets what this is about [...] Continue reading →
From Reeling to Healing
We’re all reeling from waves of shocks to our sensibilities – Hurricane Sandy, Newtown, the sequester, Boston, West, Texas and floods. With hardly time to get up and dust ourselves off between hits, I am in a lot of wobbly company. When we get up, it is to weep for the environment, our poor and [...] Continue reading →
End Run Past Corporate Greed
If we can get housing right, many of our social, medical and educational ills will fall into place. Mixing together often, community-by-community, is a strategy to stabilize families and neighborhoods by catalyzing resources to secure appropriate housing, New Community Vision is launching a consulting cooperative to facilitate gatherings at which we educate about cooperatives by [...] Continue reading →
How Crazy is That?
Fueled by the astonishing income gap between the wealthy elite and the rest of us, millions of people are hopping off the consumption grid. Cooperatives offer a higher quality of life outside the grid. Hop on over to the co-op lifestyle. New Community Vision is officially launching itself as an education and entertainment enterprise to [...] Continue reading →