More details on the Route 54 property

Today we drove back to Bloomfield to gather information about the property and look for temporary rental options. We visited a nice apartment building that had a vacancy that is available on a month-to-month basis.

We drove "around the block" at the property, a distance of about 4 miles. Then we stopped at a property across the county road but no one was home. We walked the property again, and decided to drive by the neighbor's one more time.

This time there was someone there and we stopped to talk. It was the son of the late owner who was working in the garden. He explained that the property had belonged to his grandparents. His brother had sold it to the current owner. He seemed to be happy with the idea of its being purchased by someone who would not abuse it.

He suggested we talk to his brother who owns the property immediately south of the "target" property. We drove down the county road and knocked on the neighbor's door. We had a wonderful talk with the owner and his wife, for over two hours! He took me for a ride around his property and suggested that he might be interested in selling a piece of it adjacent to the property we are considering.

This gives us a second option in the neighborhood. On our next trip we'll look up the taxes and other details at the court house.

Looking for property

We had planned to be moved from our too-large home in Indianapolis by the fall of 2006. Since it became clear we would not be getting the zoning we needed, multi-family, at the site in Owen County before the end of 2007, if at all, we decided to begin looking for another site.

We had hoped to build clustered homes, some of which would share walls, design the least intrusive system we could afford to process our waste, not subdivide the property, and incorporate other perhaps unconventional features in the homes. Part of the problem was dealing with county entities, some of whose members, to be polite, weren't very open to new ideas. So we decided to center our search on Greene County which has no zoning ordinances and, consequently, no need to apply for variances or changes.

Our goal was to get our life in the country underway with as little further delay as possible, and to get out of Indianapolis where our property taxes rose another 90% this year (after a nearly-200% raise just a few years ago), so we decided we would consider appropriate property between 3 and 25 acres. If we could find a nice property that was larger, then an intentional community might still be incorporated. If an appropriate property was smaller, we would consider it for just our own use.

We started looking at properties at the end of June. Of the suggestions from a few real estate agents, and some we found ourselves while driving the area, we visited three properties, all in Greene County. Two showed promise and we visited them again today, the Fourth of July.

One of them, east of Worthington, though it was a beautiful, forested property with lots of hills facing various directions, had serious access problems that would cost a lot of money to overcome. We had a nice talk with the adjacent landowner whose permission would be needed to access the property without a lengthy and hilly new road.

The other is on State Road 54, just under 8 miles east of Bloomfield, the Greene County seat.

After looking it up on the internet, we walked the property to see if it would work. It's over 16 acres, virtually all on a south-facing hill, has a small pond, a large pole barn and, as we found out later, a small spring. It is partially wooded and has a beautiful south view of Greene County hills into the distance.

We have decided to pursue this property and will return tomorrow to see if we can ask some of the neighbors about it.

A momentous decision

After nearly three years working to establish Raccoon Creek Community with my fellow members, it has become clear to me that the community, as we have envisioned it these past years, cannot become a reality on the site in Owen County, Indiana, at least not within a reasonable time frame--one much longer than I can accept.

Over the next few weeks I will explain some of the reasoning used to arrive at this difficult decision. We have put our hearts and souls into the project. Much work has been done on and off the site, many meetings have been held there and elsewhere, and much of the property was walked many times and marked for various purposes. Walking away from the beautiful site at Raccoon Creek is not easy.

The property will revert to our member who owned it to begin with. Disposition of other assets will be decided over the next few weeks.

I hope the property owner will still build on the site. It is currently zoned "agricultural" which allows at least a single home to be built on it.

I will try to keep readers of this blog current with our thoughts, plans and actions.