Housing Our Selves

Housing is of special interest to me. I’ve built homes from the foundation up, in New Mexico, Colorado, Georgia, and Indiana. I’ve reclaimed a homestead in New Hampshire, bought a sliver of ground in Tallahassee for a yurt, and moved into a boxtruck. Starting in 2008, I and some friends bought three houses in downtown Evansville. The mortgage was split evenly by everyone who moved in ( mostly strangers ) and we shared common spaces. We considered ourselves to be living in “co-operative housing”. As time progressed the houses were put into a non-profit, Scnaubelt Sanctuary LLC, and managed by the residents, and then finally turned over to individual occupants.

In 2010 some of us from the co-op went to a lecture in New Harmony. The speaker was Charles Durrett, an author of Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves. I had read this book, as well as stayed at Sunward Cohousing in Ann Arbor when giving a presentation at a co-operative housing conference. So, the sterility was expected.

Sunward was advertising buy-ins at $350,000. per unit while we were there. The examples in Durrett’s book were a comparable exclusivity. When confronted by someone from our houses, during the Q&A, as to why we just sat through two hours of pictures of rich white people; Durrett responded, “If i had two more hours, I could show you so many pictures of people-of-color. I just don’t have the time.” In San Francisco and Vancouver, the average cost of a house is $600,000. so half that is quite a bargain. However, we live in Evansville. The purchase price for the three co-op houses was $70,000. The first house cost $45,000 (we paid too much), the second $18,000 (we paid too much), and the third $7,000. We housed over 40 people in three years, fifteen or so of those for multiple years.

The exclusivity in Durrett’s book and presentation wasn’t only financial, but too the design and placement for these “communities”, a word that could only be used in this circumstance hollowed out, to best fit the shallow and thin ties that Alain Badiou disdains between quotation marks to fit epithetic adjectives, “international communities”, the “human community”, “intentional communities”, etc.

One of the founders of the practice of Permaculture, Dave Holmgren, wrote in ( I think it was), Permaculture : Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, that intentional communities maybe incubators for innovation, but they fail to confront the basic permaculture principle of diversity, and instead tend to be homogenous. We should ask ourselves what is so novel about these forms of housing that distinguishes them from the neighborhoods in which we already live. How can we take advantage of the diversity (capitalist dispersal) of the people around us. One place I recommend to start looking for these answers is in the writing of Matt Hern, an anarchist and author who has written about successful interventions in opening and sharing spaces and resources in the existing community. http://www.mightymatthern.com/?page_id=156