HEARTWOOD COHOUSING - WHO WE ARE
There are some behind the scenes structures that make life here possible: Management, Legal, and Financial.
Management Structure
We are self managed -- that is, we make all the decisions ourselves about running our neighborhood and we don’t hire a management company to take care of our community assets. We are organized into teams, each with specific responsibilities and authorities detailed in our Teams agreement. All team participation is voluntary, but everyone is expected to serve on some team. People tend to gravitate to teams that are a good match for their interests and talents.
We have delegated a lot of authority to teams so that most of the community work and decisions are handled at the team level. Some teams meet a couple of times per month and some a couple of times per year. All team agendas and minutes are posted on the community email chat so that anyone can keep up with what’s happening with the various teams. That also allows everyone to know of upcoming team decisions and participate in the team meetings where those decisions will be made if they want to. So if I’m particularly interested in common meals, but I’m not on the Common House team, I can attend and participate in the Common House team meetings when they are working on a new common meal policy.
The Steering team is the only team for which the team members are approved by the community. It has overall responsibility for community planning and oversight of the other teams. It prioritizes the issues that may be up for the community at any given time and schedules the handling of those issues at our biweekly Community Meetings. Community decisions are made at Community Meetings or on the email chat using a specific procedure.
See the Consensus page, Decision Making & Meetings agreement ,and Community Work agreement for more information.
Legal Structure
It’s probably best to start with a little history here. Back in the 90’s when we were creating Heartwood Cohousing, we were looking for about 60 - 80 acres for our community. We looked at hundreds of pieces of land and were getting discouraged because we couldn’t find one that had all of the characteristics we needed: water available, affordable, something that the County would allow us to subdivide, and the natural beauty and character of a place that we would call home. When we did find the land that is now Heartwood, we immediately fell in love with it, but there was one problem. It was 361 acres and about three times as much money as we had budgeted.
To develop our neighborhood (a multimillion dollar real estate project), we formed a subchapter S development corporation, but that corporation was not yet up and running when the opportunity came to buy the land. So Mac and Sandy Thomson initially bought the land with the idea of selling to the community that portion which they could afford and reselling the rest to outsiders. In the months that followed, a new plan was hatched whereby all of the land would become part of the new community; the portion that the original group could afford would become Phase 1, and the remainder would be retained by Mac & Sandy to someday be developed into Phase 2.
See the Phase 2 page for more details.
The development corporation bought the Phase 1 land from Mac and Sandy and developed Heartwood Cohousing. From a legal perspective, we created a standard subdivision with 24 private lots (about 5 acres total). We reserved the rest of the land as open space (about 200 acres). It was important for us to structure ourselves as a standard subdivision so that the County would give us the necessary approvals and banks would give us construction loans and mortgages. We sold the 24 private lots to community members.
Community members own their own homes, carports, and lots just like they would in any other subdivision. The only real ownership difference between Heartwood and a mainstream subdivision is that our proportion of privately owned land to HOA owned common land is tiny. The vast majority of our land is held as common open space. The other big differences between Heartwood and a mainstream subdivision is that our site design was specifically created to promote community interaction and we all share the intention of developing close relationships with our neighbors.
When the Phase 1 development was completed, we dissolved the development corporation, formed a nonprofit homeowners association (HOA), and transferred the community assets to the HOA (open space land, common house, greenhouse, workshop, etc.). The HOA continues to be our umbrella legal structure, and Mac and Sandy still own the Phase 2 land and are working to develop it.
As part of our subdivision formation, we created Covenants, Codes, and Restrictions (CC&R’s), which form the legal document that governs our neighborhood. In practice, we almost never refer to our CC&R’s. They are there as a legal backup if we need them, but for our everyday life, we rely on our community Agreements. We create Agreements through our community decision making process.
See the Consensus page and our Decision Making & Meetings agreement for more information on how we make community decisions.
Financial Structure
Our HOA is the legal entity of the community and therefore handles all of the community finances. Every year we agree on an operating budget and a special projects budget for the following year, which authorizes spending for all of our teams. In addition to annual budgets, over the years we have established significant financial reserves for big future expenditures for such things as replacing roofs, the common house stove, water pumps, pathways, etc. We are on sound financial footing.