Cooperative living in a college town

By Corin Blust
Sun contributor
Last fall, I moved into a broken-down yellow house on Kingsley Street in Ann Arbor along with 11 other people. Sound familiar to a reality show you’ve seen on television? The only difference was that we were not regular tenants.
Our goal was to fix up the house and make it the newest and best housing cooperative in our college town. This fall, a year after taking on this goal, I believe we might finally be on our way to success.

When we each walked into the Inter Cooperative Council — the organization run by the members of all the cooperative houses in Ann Arbor — and signed our individual contracts to live in the house, which we called Zeno, we had no idea what to expect. What we found in late August of 2006 when we moved in was that the previous occupants had not been particularly kind to the house.
There were piles of cheap, broken furniture everywhere; holes in the walls (including a particularly noticeable one that allowed small rodents 24-hour access to our pantry); unidentifiable stains on the carpets that caused even strong believers in bare feet to find shoes; we kept waking up to discover the power going out in the middle of the night; there were only two functioning bathrooms for 12 of us, and the plumbing would eventually cause a major flood in the basement.
However, there were a lot of good things about the house too. It had parking. It was in a great location and had those impossibly cute antique radiators in the rooms. And we each got our own bedroom, an extreme rarity in a cooperative situation.
The best thing, though, is that there is no landlord in a cooperative house. The house was ours to treat as we liked. We could paint the bathroom walls Day-Glo orange and the hallways silver, install shelves everywhere, hang pictures on the walls using nails, and plant whatever we wanted in the yard. It was up to us to make it homey, and it would stay that way until future coopers wanted to make it even better.
Even before we moved our personal things in, we worked for countless hours to clear out everything and make the house livable. We went to discount stores, thrift shops and garage sales and bought pots and pans and dishes and microwaves and radios and silverware and new carpets and shower curtains and paint and toilets and doorknobs and cleaning supplies and tried not to lose our minds in the chaos that Zeno had become. The end of the madness was in sight, and we would receive a great place to live in exchange for the hard work we put in.
We were proud of what we were doing, especially considering that we were all full-time students at the University of Michigan and fixing up the house was an extremely fulfilling challenge.
Why would we want to live in a coop, anyway? There are few ways of living with a large group of people that are as efficient or comfortable. We can sign leases that coincide with the school year, so people like me who want to return to Leelanau County in the summer can go home for those precious four months and come back to the same room in the house in the fall and know what to expect.
Part of the rent we pay each month goes toward purchasing bulk quantities of food, usually at the farmer’s market in Kerrytown, that we use to cook meals for the entire house Sunday through Thursday. The sense of community that is built by sitting down to a delicious meal with good people five nights a week is priceless, especially when you don’t have to cook or clean up.
Who cooks and cleans up? We each do five hours of work a week on maintaining some part of the house, whether it’s cleaning a bathroom, keeping the kitchen stocked with food, collecting rent checks and keeping the budget low, cooking or mowing the lawn.
As a result of our determination last year, this Fall I am pleased to announce that the bathrooms are generally clean, the refrigerators have tasty leftovers in them, and life is pretty good. There is little or no discussion about why something was not cleaned or put away because we made it clear who should be doing what. If they don’t do it, they have a house full of annoyed people to contend with. It’s the best-organized chaos one could think up, and having chores on a system helps the new coopers feel comfortable getting into the rhythm of the house.
Looking to the future, I would love to bring cooperative living to Leelanau County. It seems like a great option for people like me who want to live in the community but do not want to commit to a year-long lease, deal with a cranky landlord, or buy a lot of their own furniture, dishes and pots and pans. Plus, I can see a coop house blossoming into a great community asset. Here, at Zeno, we host monthly potlucks and invite people over for dinner all the time, and we encourage people to do anything to the house they think would make it better, from building a bonfire pit in the backyard to painting crazy murals on the walls. Cooperative living is a unique way to share space with a community, and I think it needs to come to our area.
Corin Blust, a Maple City native, is a student at the University of Michigan. If you have any thoughts or questions about cooperative living, please email her at corin.blust (at) gmail.com.