April 13, 2006

By ADAM HYLA
Editor

Edie Welch and her daughter had moved seven times by her little girl’s fifth birthday. It was hard to find a cheap place to rent that wasn’t substandard. So Welch was especially relieved to find a Mercer Street apartment building that was safe, well-maintained, and populated with friendly neighbors.

Twenty years later, her daughter has flown the coop and is now an Urban Planning student at MIT. Welch is still living in a building owned by the Capitol Hill Housing Improvement Program and managed, as it was back then, by the tenants themselves.

For Welch and several other single moms and hundreds of others, CHHIP’s buildings have been an affordable and inviting place to live — where tenants weren’t called tenants, but members who collected the rent, selected new neighbors, did the upkeep, and worked out their finances through group meetings. The co-op, Welch says, has provided “not only cheap rent but a sense of community.”

The cooperative management system that the non-profit housing provider CHHIP has used since it first became a landlord in the early 1980s will come to an end. Two buildings in the Rainier Valley and one in northeast Seattle ended their cooperative management last year, merging into the non-profit’s conventional property-management operations. Capitol Hill’s co-op will follow suit July 1. Co-op members will hand over their responsibilities of budgeting, selecting new members, collecting rent, and maintaining the buildings — and to pay for staff doing this work, their rents are likely to go up by $30 in January 2007.

It’s a group decision of residents and CHHIP management. The Mutual Housing Council — Capitol Hill, which represents the 37 households at the neighborhood’s six co-ops in dealings with CHHIP, voted in late December to end the co-op system immediately. Staff asked the co-op to give CHHIP managers six months’ transition time. The change arises from an 18-month-long series of conversations between staff and tenants, says CHHIP director Chuck Weinstock — the first one in about a decade.

“ We were saying ‘How does everyone think this is working?’” he says. “We reviewed some frustrations each party had about how the model worked or didn’t. Did [members] want to continue as is, continue in some modified way, or convert to rental?”

What worked, say members and CHHIP management, was the sense of camaraderie and community most co-op members felt upon moving in. Residents treasured the task of interviewing applicants and selecting new members themselves. What didn’t work was lax member governance — which meant that the job of dealing with members who didn’t pay rent on time or do their chores fell to CHHIP’s management.

In May 2005, while neighborhood Mutual Housing Councils — CHHIP’s term for the bodies that represented each cluster of buildings — in northeast Seattle and Rainier Valley voted to relinquish their cooperative duties, the Mutual Housing Council on Capitol Hill asked for a year’s time to get back on track. CHHIP granted them a six-month period of what Weinstock calls “test and demonstration,” with another vote on the issue in December.

Regarding the lapsed enforcement, “Our part was, ‘Folks, if we’re going to do this, we need to do this,’” he says. “Members have to hold members accountable for their actions; we’re not going to be the cop here.”

Boardmember Eden Bossom says everyone kicked into gear. “For about two or three months there was a high amount of participation, and we were all cracking down, but pretty soon the co-op went into its old patterns.”

Then came the December vote. “The question I finally brought back to my neighbors was, ‘Are you prepared to maintain this amount of time investment?’” says Bossom. The answer was no; a majority of the council voted to end the co-op.

The referendum came too soon for Dana McCusker; she says six months “was not enough time to change the culture.” McCusker, who lives in the Fredonia Apartments on 15th Avenue, resigned her position as the council’s president soon after. Members continued to talk with staff about the possibility of retaining their power to select new tenants in what’s been termed a “hybrid” arrangement — a discussion that “felt like a waste of my time,” she says. “If you want a co-op, make one.”

McCusker says she blames neither tenants nor staff for the loss of cooperative management. “The larger issue is that we’re losing community everywhere in our culture, and community is really important.” Running well cooperatively was “dependent on peer pressure and participation: some people carry most of the load and others don’t do the work” — the kind of environment that leads the best members to burnout.

Bossom and other co-op members say that perhaps relinquishing their duties will free them up to build even stronger relationships.

What is at the core of the co-op is “cultivating a strong sense of community and trust. We don’t need a document to maintain that,” says Bossom.

“ If you have a forced situation where people are required to do things, and people are chronically not doing them, there’s some animosity. Once that expectation is removed, people can focus on being neighbors.” n