From: Robert Abrams <rabrams@igc.org>
Newsgroups: alt.co-ops
Date: 24 Jul 92 10:43 PDT
Subject: The House and the Lifecycle
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1337700013:000:3932
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!rabrams    Jul 24 10:43:00 1992


This message is in response to a number of postings.

I think that the discussion has been overlooking people's
lifecycles and how this relates to cooperatives generally, and
housing in particular.

Keeping this point in mind, I need to ask a question.  Are we
trying to provide housing, or we trying to foster cooperation?  We
can do both, but different priorities would indicate different
strategies.

My own feeling is that we are better off placing our priority on
cooperation.  Afterall, it only takes one person in a cooperative
house who is not enthusiatic about cooperation and does not want
to be there to create major headaches for everyone else.  I
remember one guy who Hammarskjold had to get the police to serve
him an eviction notice.

On the other hand, if someone is inspired by cooperation, they
will in due course create a demand for cooperative institutions,
one of which is cooperative housing.

This brings me to my point about the lifecycle and its
relationship to housing.  As a person grows and matures, her
housing needs will change.  She may start in a room in her
parents' house, moves to a student dorm/group house, needs more
space and so gets an apartment, shaks up with someone whether in
wedlock or not and moves into a starter house, starts a business
and gradually moves from larger to ever larger house.  Obviously
this isn't the only path, but it does represent the general
pattern people hope for.

The problem from this perspective with cooperative housing,
especially student cooperative housing, is that it cooperative
housing addresses the early stage of independent living, but it
does not deal with the later stages.  Preserving the cooperative
spirit in the later stages of life is just as important as
creating it early on.

Therefore, the cooperative housing movement should consider such
options as co-housing (private apartment/housing units with some
community space and some collective ownership, as well as a lot of
collective decision making), and community land trusts (see the
work of Charles Matthei, where the community owns the land and the
individual owns the buildings, with a formula put into the lease
so that the community can retain some of the resale value), and
other forms.  The cooperative housing movement should also look
into its ownership mechanisms.  People might be given an option to
buy into their residence.  This would be a way for the coop to
raise capital and for the resident to reduce their rent payments.

I would also encourage the cooperative housing movement to be more
active in building alliances with other cooperative movements,
such as the cooperative foods movement.

Membership in a food coop allows a person to experience a true
cooperative community without having to live in one.  A food coop
allows people in a housing cooperative to further reduce their
expenses.  A food coop has the potential resources to assist the
housing cooperatives move housing out of the for profit sector,
through such means as paying for housing as a staff benefit and
other measures.

A food coop could also assume strategic importance for coalitions
of housing cooperatives.  I remember that the Stanford Coops had
tremendous trouble trying to act together.  We were able to pull
together in a crisis (recruiting drives when a house was about to
lose its coop status, or after the October 89 earthquake), but we
would have been in a better position if we had been organized on a
regular basis before then.
 In general, the coops at Stanford were afraid of even the
suggestion of any centralization and were perfectly happy doing
their own thing.

However, if housing coops were members of food coops, possibly as
buying groups as well as as individual members, the housing coops
would have real, utilitarian interactions with each other.  This,
at least in theory, should make building a coop housing network
easier.

Bob Abrams ZKIX@vax5.cit.cornell.edu