The benefits and disadvantages of living in a housing cooperative

St-Henri Chronicles #18
The benefits and disadvantages of living in a housing cooperative
July 21st, 2009

No construction holiday for La Pause Café housing cooperative! The coffee break is over: after a couple of years of relative neglect, our members have taken advantage of the last few days of nice weather to do some badly-needed building maintenance. Internal politics had dampened tenant's ardor for collective responsibilities, but a major mice infestation served as a wake-up call, and we are back on the job: painting, installing wire-mesh under the balconies to discourage the critters, replacing faulty plumbing, straightening out the clothes-line pole, and tree-trimming.

This is our family's sixth year of cooperative living. The benefits are numerous, but, like with anything, there are also disadvantages. How does it work, some of you may be asking. It's relatively simple: as tenant-members, we have all the rights (with some exceptions) of any regular tenant, and all the administrative and maintenance responsibilities of any owner. Decisions are taken democratically, in a general assembly, which, in our case, also serves as board of directors (we only have six units). In a small cooperative like ours, each member is in charge of a different area. (I am the treasurer of La Pause Café.) The rents, of course, go to pay the maintenance costs, municipal taxes, mortgage payments, cooperative association fees, etc. They don't go into the pockets of any private speculators. As opposed to a condominium, members have no capital invested in the property – when you leave you get back your membership fee (from 50$, which is most common, to a 1000$, in cooperatives that want to exclude low-income people – they do exist!). Cooperatives are not communes – aside from the collective administration of the building, we go about living as we would do normally. Though we do end up getting to know our fellow members pretty well, whether we like that or not.

Cooperatives are generally funded by the government, and, symptom of the tepid and fluctuating public support for social housing, there are more than a dozen different programs that have been created, funded, and then abandoned over the years. Too many to explain the nuances of. Suffice it to say that there are three types: cooperatives in which the rents are not subsidized (but are nonetheless lower than average), cooperatives in which half the rents are subsidized (at 25% of one's salary – you have to be low-income, for example, make less than 23,000/year for a single person), and cooperatives in which all the rents are subsidized. All cooperatives are publicly funded for their construction...ours is an exception in that it was funded by the FECHIMM (Fédération de coopératives d'habitation de l'Île de Montréal) in yet another pilot program that never turned into anything. Part of the creation of the cooperative involves a bank loan as well, and a mortgage.

The advantages, obviously, begin with finances. If you have a subsidized rent, the fact that you only pay 25% of your income allows you to get by on what remains. In our case, the rent is not subsidized, but because the cooperative is 15 years old, rent-increases have come very slowly, to cover maintenance costs and tax-increases, not to keep pace with an artificially jacked-up market. But beyond the money issue, living in a cooperative gives one the chance to have some influence on one's surroundings, to feel a bit like a property-owner (but with less responsibility and more mobility – you don't have to sell off to get out). This feeling of control is very important, and one that generally we are deprived of in our everyday lives. (Particularly poor people, working-class people, disadvantaged and dispossessed people). Generally, repairs are more quickly looked after than in the private market, especially in the low-rent private market (a disappearing breed – though we still have a bit of it here in St-Henri). Finally (and this was a big one for us) you have security in that no landlord is going to come along and repossess your place or jack up the rent or stop doing repairs to drive you out so he can jack up the rent. As long as you pay your rent, you can stay as long as you like.

Even, sometimes, when you don't pay your rent. Okay, that's not really true, or it shouldn't be true. But when we got to La Pause Café, there were three (out of six) tenants who owed a total of 20,000 dollars to the co-op! They were still living here, paying the rent off and on – some of them had gone four years without paying. And no one had done anything about it. Our arrival changed things in that we asked simple questions about the finances and, innocently (because we weren't aware of the depth of the problem until it was on its way to being resolved) spurred the old-timers to action. Two of the tenants have now reimbursed almost all the money they owed, and the tenant that wasn't willing or able to was evicted.

So the advantage of a cooperative – self-administration, autonomy, democratic rule – is also one of it's disadvantages. The human element, as always. There is no boss, no central authority to keep everything together and everyone on their toes. And what we discover, I think, in any kind of co-op, be it housing, work, or whatever, is that we're not used to being autonomous. We're not used to being autonomous, we're used to having things decided for us, and we're not used to making decisions together either. That's where the politics come in. For a thousand petty reasons (the details of which I won't bore you with) these internal tensions have been present in this co-op – and I imagine many others – since the beginning. Most of them revolve around the idea, “I am doing my share and the others aren't.” That's why work in the co-op ground to a halt a couple of years back, we all kind of threw up our hands and said, “Well if the others aren't going to work, I won't either!”. It was the external threat – the mice! - that got us working together again.

Yes, it's a microcosm. Just like in the neighbourhood here: most of us went about our business, not paying much attention to those around us, until Turcot came along. Even with Turcot, most of us continued going about our business. Some of us got together to do something about it. And just like in the housing cooperative La Pause Café, we're not used to this business of organizing things collectively. We're like children when it comes to that. Just learning to walk. All our lives we've been taught to look out for number one. And to listen to the boss. Let the experts decide. Go along quietly. Following orders. Or giving them. Maybe we dream of something different. Between dreams and their manifestation there is much hard work (and learning) to be done. Artists get an idea, the idea doesn't then magically appear on the canvas, it doesn't then manifest itself concretely and beautifully in the world. There is a long process of trial and error, of experimentation, of failures and small victories. Cooperative living, then, is part of this long process of creating a society based on solidarity and mutual-aid.

The best of people comes out in contexts of cooperation, especially when we don't have the choice. When faced with earthquakes, destructive highway projects, and even little mice, we band together, in the face of urgency, and can accomplish incredible things. And then, the worst can come out too, when we put our personal interests before the interests of the group.
Cooperative housing is thus not for everyone. Living in a cooperative requires a lot of mental and physical energy. Not everyone has the capacities, either, to function in a cooperative context. That is why it is such a shame that the Canadian and Quebec governments have restricted their social housing funding to cooperatives over the last 16 years. In Quebec, 2000-3000 units of cooperative housing are created annually. There should be more. But there should also be more public housing administered by the public sector or community organizations, to provide homes for people who don't have the desire, or the capacity, to live in a cooperative context.