Blows Against the Co-op Empire
From LothWiki
"You can't go home again"
This article was was written by a member of the Madison Community Co-op's office staff who has been involved with housing co-ops in the area since 1970 and founded three of them. It will appear in a special issue of "Communities" Magazine on intentional urban communities sometime this spring. The MCC office is in the basement of St. Francis House, 1001 University Avenue (271-2667).
Many of Madison's housing co-ops hove fallen on hard times. Specifically, the Madison Community Co-op, which owns four of the ten co-op houses in its organization, no longer has the resources to keep these houses politically and economically viable. and even if it could for what purpose?
The community came to our aid in October 1974, when we won Le Chateau Co-op away from Korb, an apartment landlord. But it was a Pyhrric victory: Le Cheteau was broke for a year afterward. after seven years of abuse, Stone Manor Co-op was abandoned by all but 8 of its members. It looked like the Battle of the Bulge had been fought in the living room. This core group is repairing the entire building, trying to find stable, committed people to give it another go. If they don't, Stone Manor will have to be sold.
People in the Madison Community Co-op (MCC) are talking about either drastic reorganization or complete dissolution, The co-op houses which were so much a part of the counter-culture scene are now a dead albatross around the community's neck. The co-ops provide a home for some fine movement people, but the drain energy and contribute nothing. What fallows is a history of housing co-ops in Madison. Both FFA and MCC welcome community input on this dilemma, since it was the alternative community which founded the co-op movement in the first place.
The rise and demise of MCC is a carious sequence of improbable events and impossible people. It goes back to 1968 when a bunch of hippie-type students at UW from a few communal living situations got together to shoot the shit. They made two well thought out decisions: 1. to expand their ideal by creating housing co-operatives, and 2. to bring in straight folks (in abundant supply at the U) to run interference on theneccessaryland deals. They succeeded. In 1969 the inchoate organization, then called the Madison Association of Student Co-ops (MASC), bought its first house, Stone Manor, on a 15- year land contract (such a deal!), a 35-room sorority-gone-bust on the shores of Lake Mendonta.
At that Point, no one realized what insipid things land contracts are. You agree to pay a sum of money too large over to scrape together, but sometime in the future so you don't have to think about indentured servant. Now we have a fair-sized empire of ten member houses, four of which we own on land contract. Lothlorien, Le Chateau and Tralfamadore, all large ex-fraternity or rooming houses in the Langdon area, are essentially slums, inhabited mostly by students and other miscellaneous transients, who arrive with no expectations and leave with no involvement. Long rage planing is not done, and perhaps not possible, so even basic building maintenance is neglected. We could try to sell the buildings and get out of the housing business, but the crumbling house are no longer worth their purchase price, which we owe the perspective sellers and could be sued for. Ad all these land contracts are coming due anyway. Perhaps you're wondering how all this happened.
Madison was the scene of a lot of so-called "student unrest" in the late 60's. Madison also had a vary impressive fraternity row, close to campus but tucked away on scenic lake shore Langdon St. But during the 60's fraternities became unpopular, and many of the buildings closed up for lack of members. Apartments. But most of the land merchants were unable to buy because their usual allies, the banks, would not lend them the money. The whole downtown area was red-lined by the riots. And the beautiful buildings just sat there.
Co-op people got wise to this situation and contacted the frats about were quite the gang of the counter-culture. The frats were overjoyed at the prospect of letting hippies pay off their mounting debts, especially since they would be using the buildings as originally conceived, and not gutting the interiors (not intentionally, anyway). many of these lease arrangements had provisions for alumni to hold parties in the houses during homecoming weekend. But as tear gas reappeared with the crocuses, the frats ultimately sold their houses on land contract to the individual groups to whom they had leased.
After the Army Math Research Center blew up in 1970, the political situation in Madison changed, and the real estate market slowly began to reflect the glorious dawning of non-involvement and token liberalism. The buildings got hard to find and harder to finance. The co-op organization structured for shooting the shit could not take advantage of the few breaks it got. So MASC was reorganized in 1972 into MCC. MCC attempted to centralize services and holdings in order to present a respectable front to lending institutions or their ilk.
But the independent and anarchist traditions of the member co-ops, of the 60's which spawned them, made this a difficult task. From the first, Madison rejected the "Ann Arbor model." Co-ops in Ann Arbor, Michigan, are highly centralized under their inter-Co-operative council (ICC), which has a large, competent, well-paid staff. This staff essentially cleans up after the co-op members, University of Michigan students for whom the co-ops are expressly tailored, and ensures that they never have any real problems to confront. even house membership is decided at the ICC office; the individual co-ops get no say. Ann Arbor ICC is over 30 years old now and going strong. But professional management is hardly the vanguard of an alternative society.
In Madison, the individual houses make all their own decisions, choose their own members, draw up their own budgets and control their own finances. in this way the co-op members take the ultimate control and responsibility for their own lives - in theory, anyway. Unfortunately, many have absolutely no desire to do this or pay the additional cost of management to do it for them. They are in Madison to go to school. Our co-ops are conveniently located for this purpose, and so affordable. The community which sprang from the 60's student movement ebbed away from campus to less transient areas of town, leaving the co-operative ark high and dry atop the ivory tower. And here we sit, an organization structured as a representative democracy. perpetually questioning its own legitimacy if not actually short of a quorum (especially at exam time), and perpetually in economic crisis. The hard economic decisions on $750,000 of real estate have precluded any meaningful dialogue.
Given the raw materials we've got to work with, MCC has come up with a few damn good ideas, such as that of a rotating staff collective. In the early days, MCC had one "paid" position ($100 a month, later increased to $200), that of Executive Director. This person staffed the office, answered mail, was responsible for community relations and day-to-day continuity, etc. Very quickly, the executive Director's personality became blurred with the co-op's philosophy, as you might expect from anyone insane enough to get involved in such an endless job for such low pay. And said insanity turned off many people. When the second Executive Director suddenly resigned, MCC decided to replace same with a three person rotating staff. Besides co-ordinating day-to-day affairs, the staff was conceived as co-operatively subsidized community trainees. But to many students, paid stay = management. The $1.30 per month they each so might as well be spent on drugs or football tickets.
It's curious how so many students can really turn on to the old exploitation trip. Hungry to identify with all the struggles of oppressed third world peoples, they zealously litanize about how their co-op is really their enemy. unlike landlords or other feudal relics, who extract their dubious due be force (or threat thereof), the co-op movement has relied on conscious humanistic motivation. But students learn early that you get ahead the most by getting away with the most: All our co-ops have accounts members of at least $1000. Before Stone Manor collapsed last December, their figure was over $4000. You might say that we need more member education, that people's consciousness and sensitivity need to be raised. Our education committee holds regular meetings and no one shows up. But damn it, is it really too much to ask people to put out not just for their own community, but for their own fucking good?
How do you get away from this petty financial nonsense which is totally destroying a potentially dynamic movement force? Those of us who started these co-ops had visions of something different; a system for better than anything capitalism has to offer, a different structure of basic social relationship, models whose very existence gave life to the struggle for social and political change. And we have to organize around these basic alternatives, or we'll have the choice (should we ever get strong enough to matter) of being splashed by capitalism or becoming indistinguishable from it. Look at the rural co-ops of the 30's if you don't believe it.
The idea of banding together through MCC for political and economic survival made a lot of sense at the time. We could not foresee the symbolic manifestations: The MCC-owned houses do not own up to their basic responsibilities because all their dealings with the real world go through us. Perhaps a different set-up in which each house were itself an "office" of MCC and each treasurer on "officer," permitting direct contact with the capitalists, might have worked out. Ironically, it's the independent houses, which MCC sneered at for their unprogressive tendency not to see past their own front doors, the people we accused of having the alternative consciousness of a carrot, which are the most dynamic and viable co-ops. Many independent houses have failed, and more probably will when their few members with business acumen move on. But it'll be with a bang, not a whimper. They know what they're up against, and they care.
This "precis" comes down pretty hard on students, and this demands some clarification. A lot of folks in university towns like Madison come to go to school, which is certainly OK. These folks are usually temporary residents and behave as such, not involving themselves in community affairs. Alternatively, many members of the community enroll at the U to learn specific skills or otherwise enrich their lives. often these people come as transients, but decided that while in Madison their immediate political and social environment was as important as a future career. All these "students" are OK. It's the "stoodints" who are not. They're so hip, so involved, so sensitive and aware - AFTER CLASS!
"Hypocrites! You wear the people's cap on your head but you underwear's embroidered with crowns!" (Marat/Sade)
So what's to do? It's absurd to adopt gestapo tactics just to make an organization economically viable. A dyed-in-the-wool anarchist like myself can't really get it up to play Joe Stalin, and besides' that would defeat what nebulous purpose we have. MCC has run out of money and I've run out of energy; but Gertrude Stein's last Delirious words are more coherent then mine: "What's the answer? On the other hand, what's the question?"
