Practical Anarchy #12,
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CATCH

The Mutual Housing Umbrella and the Birth of the Co-op A Report from the Bloomington Trenches

In the Winter of 93-94, what had been for twelve years a hush-hush "problem" in Bloomington erupted into a full-blown crisis. Suddenly, the city government and local Real Estate developers were scrambling to pass the blame and the buck for what had been a decade and a half of deregulated freeloading. Snouts buried in the trough of tax abatements, Federal Home Funds, and Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs), the avaricious pigs had grown corpulent during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, to the detriment not only of low income families and homeless people, but to the overall quality of life in the community.

A study done jointly by the State of Indiana and local housing agencies found that, not surprisingly, Bloomington has the greatest lack of affordable housing in IndianaÑmore than Gary, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, and Evansville. Now, in light of a recent Federal Report ranking Bloomington-Monroe County as the 11th poorest metropolitan statistical area in the nation, as well as the closing of the three-year Section 8 waiting list, and devastating industrial closings and downsizing, Real Estate developers and city officials are sweating bullets.

But the final straw came this Spring, when a consortium of greedy developers calling themselves "Pinnacle Properties" bought out the last vestige of low-income housing in downtown Bloomington: the Allen Building. Home to a diverse array of families and individuals, old and young, townies and students, artists and musicians, anarchists and surrealists, the Allen building was a microcommunity in itselfÑand a stick in the craw of the mayor's office, which has been hell-bent on driving out anything from the downtown area without a credit card and some purchasing power. It was, in fact, the last bulwark of what was once a vibrant and diverse public culture in the heart of the city. The rest of that culture had been swept out by gentrification throughout the 80s, forced to move either to the periphery of town or out of town altogether. Now the Allen Building is being renovated into high-income student and professional housing, designed for people who can shop in the costly, effete clothing stores that replaced Bloomington Hardware, Harriman's News Stand, and a host of other local institutions which had served a broad sector of the community.

Many homeless people stayed in the Allen Building because the shelters were overflowing with the refugees of urban renewal. Poor families, individuals, and homeless folks depend on close proximity to the downtown area where most of the jobs and human services are located. Unable to afford cars, and given the horrendous condition of public transportation in town, they have been mightily stiffed by the rich and powerful. The utter lack of affordable housing means that a per centage of those displaced end up homeless; in fact, Bloomington "enjoys" a higher per capita homeless population that New York City!

Students bore the brunt of the early blame. Indeed, the presence of 35,000 students in a town of the same size creates monumental competition for slots in the housing stock. Indiana University is partly to blame for its atrocious lack of housing contingencies: no student housing has been built since the early 70s, and the administration maintains a dry-campus law which encourages students to move off campus as soon as possible. And to be sure, most students are oblivious to their role as pawns in the gentrification game and in the destruction and disintegration of neighborhoods.

But in the end, the blame must rest squarely on the shoulders of the profiteers and their supporting lackeys in the city, state, and federal governments. "Our" city government has been so overwhelmingly favorable to business interests that nearly 98% of all the present City Council's resolutions have been in the favor of developers. In other words, ask and ye shall receive. Aside from council resolutions, the Housing Code enforcement has been nil for low income housing throughout the 70s and 80s, due primarily to the political connections of developers. Code is used in BloomingtonÑas elsewhereÑas a weapon against the poor, not as a set of protections, and this was no more in evidence than when the city government proposed to use the code violations of the Allen Building to condemn the structure and kick out the residents so as to avoid paying relocation costs.

These are the people to blame, city officials and private developers. They are the ones profitingÑwhether economically or politicallyÑfrom poor peoples' misery. Developers point to the market as if it has a life of its own independent of the morality of its users, as if they were COMPELLED to charge enormously high rents that favored multiple-income student arrangements while squeezing poor and even moderate-income families to the geopolitical margins. City officials turn a blind eye, and indeed facilitate this process, charging that limits to the market system are limits to freedomÑirregardless of the effects of market activity on the community as a whole. Finally, city officials and developers blame one another in a constant circus of culpability and denial. In the meantime, people suffer and traditional solutions seem remote and pointless at best.

But when developers and city officials took on the Allen building, they challenged a group of people who were already fed up with the destruction of neighborhoods through gentrification. Nothing changed from 1993 to 1994 in terms of the actual scope of the housing ''problem,'' except that now voices were being raised, and the "problem" could graduate to a "crisis" whose dimensions and origins would be part of public discussion. No longer could political hacks and rich developers hide behind silence: people from all walks of life were speaking up and articulating diverse concerns and interpretations into a substantial critique. In February, a lengthy cover-story appeared in the January issue of the Bloomington Voice, a local alternative weekly, titled "Bloomington Gentrified," and the city was awash in the rhetoric of crisis.

I wrote that article, on behalf of the residents of the Allen Building, where I had also lived for a time. From that moment on, many of us felt that we could not turn back, and that though we were to lose the Allen Building, we would organize to find workable solutions that would blend our anti-profit, anti-capitalist and grass roots ideals with pragmatic strategies for creating affordable housing.

Many of us have squatted in other cities, but recognize that squatting depends on the prevalence of neighborhoods or regions where the housing stock is economically "dead" or comatose. No such opportunities exist in Bloomington; developers keep a tight grip on properties and check up on them regularly, even if they are unoccupied. Thus, we had to look to other strategies which would be locally appropriate. Taking our cue from successes in Madison, Wisconsin, we decided that co-operative housing was our best bet.

In January of 1994 we formed a non-profit, grass roots community development corporation dedicated to establishing affordable co-operative housing in Bloomington on a large scale. CATCH (Citizens Acting Together for Co-operative Housing). As we envisioned it, CATCh's mission would be twofold: 1) to act as a mutual housing association in order to leverage public and private monies to buy properties, which we would then develop into co-operatives and 2) to pull these properties permanently out of the speculation racket by placing them onto a Community Land Trust. By eliminating the profit variable in the housing equation, an affordable stock of housing could emerge through co-operative arrangements.

How, then, have we gone about the nuts and bolts of organizing a mutual housing association? What ancillary projects have we landed ourselves in through this process?

Perhaps the most important question to answer has been that of strategy: how do we, as an organization, take on this mammoth problem? Do we adopt an ingratiating approach so as to grease the egos of city bureaucrats who hand out entitlements (and lose our self-respect and that of our community)? Do we hit head on with biting attacks on the municipal government and real estate developers, risking any opportunities to actually accomplish something solid?

We partially answered these questions through the structure, temperament, and composition of our group. First, in order to get underway, we formulated a platform statement and a mission statement, as well as a set of by-laws, in order to incorporate and apply for non-profit status. The benefit of incorporation is the same for a grass roots organization as it is for a transnational enterprise: limited liability. No individual in a corporation can be sued for damages or held accountable for failure to make payments. In such cases, the corporation itself dissolves but the individuals will not lose their livelihoods in the processÑa crucial benefit for groups like ours, composed of poor, homeless, and low-income people. Next we applied for a 501(c)3 designation as a charitable organization. 501(c)3, or non-profit status, which legalizes our commitment and qualifies us for all kinds of grants, low-interest loans, and tax credits. Moreover, any structures we buy will be exempt from property and other taxes. Finally, we constructed a set of by-laws, required for incorporation and tax exemption, and a good idea for fail-safing the organization to insure that its original mission be respected and adhered to.

Hardwiring the by-laws against the intervention of profiteers or special interests was a lengthy but worthwhile process. In order to maintain our mission as non-profit housing developers for ourselves and other poor people who become involved, we wrote in an income-ceiling clause which can only be waved by consensus. We created a board of directors because it is required by law, but subverted the law by making everyone who joins the group a board member. We created board officers, again required by law, but subverted the legal intent by disempowering them to the status of functionaries with special duties. In practice, tasks will be shared by everyone, while officers do the grunt maintenance.

Finally we brainstormed nearly every kind of decisions that would have to be made, and assigned a method of decision-making to each concomitant with its weight and importance. The methods include: consensus, 2/3 majority, simple majority, and delegation/autonomous. In this way, we can avoid the pitfalls of trying to make every decision by consensus, but can reserve consensus-building for truly momentous decisions. As part of the by-laws, this will insure a smooth, coherent, and concise decision-making process throughout the life of the organization.

Next we chose a member to be our executive director, our public figure and spokesperson, our lifeline to municipal and state agencies and bureaus. Cheryl Damron, a dynamic powerhouse and schmooz artist extraordinaire, is the executive director for CATCH. This means that she is our (not-as-yet) paid staff who we, the board, hire to do all of our dirty work. Of course we all pitch in for the grant-writing, researching, and so forth, but Cheryl is our chief liaison and front for our group. Besides, very few of us are capable of talking with city bureaucrats and real estate pigs without losing our temper and wanting to string them up! Cheryl does that talking for us. I highly recommend that every municipally-oriented organization have a Cheryl Damron!

Having an executive director has solved a lot of our problems of tack and approach. Cheryl represents us publicly, and endures the day-to-day negotiations and meeting work with the city officials, state authorities, and various other agencies. Her approach is tactful but never snivelling, direct and to the point, headstrong but never jeopardizing. This frees the rest of us up to do unilateral work against gentrification, to develop literature and flyers and pamphlets against profit-based development, and to generally enhance the already existing anti-rent sentiment in our community through dissemination and organization. We can take these actions as individuals, we can write and speak out fiercely as individuals, without having to represent CATCH as an organization. It makes for a clear and delineated relationship between the individual and the collective.

Our basic strategy for creating the conditions within which affordable co-operative housing can exist has been through municipal intervention. We take the upper hand in defining the scope and nature of the housing crisis, we counter the US Housing and Urban Development department's definition of "affordable" with one that is locally appropriate and locally contextualized, we place our feet in the doors of the city agencies and departments, we insert ourselves into the business and the process of municipal development in order to buy ourselves both breathing room and funding, and to make our critiques of development and our solutions part of public discussion. Moreover, we always insist that the issue of private enrichment of real estate developers from municipal funds is an ongoing public issue.

The strategy of municipal intervention has brought us into conflict and negotiation with city officials on a number of issues surrounding the housing crisis. These include: parking and traffic, zoning, human service funding, work and labor, and perhaps the biggest oneÑeconomic development. In sum, most of CATCH's work amongst our community and with/against the city machinery comes down to the very basic set of issues that the British anarchist writer Colin Ward foretells: urban planning and design.

Drawing on Ward's work on housing and design, as well as economist Herman Daley's writings on steady-state economics, and inserting ourselves into the business of the city at all points possible, we have articulated broad critiques of standard capitalist development schemesÑwhich we are working now to make public. We are steadfastly critiquing some of the sacred cows of the protectionist marketÑthe racket of capital (such as the quasi-religious adherence to "growth" ideology), and providing our own practical solutions for organizing and fostering parallel or counter-institutions. These include everything from starting up tenent organizations, co-operative workplaces and child care centers, to plowing community gardens, expanding green space, creating community food processing shops, organizing rotating credit pools as capital outlay, mandating rent control and compact urban form (no-growth policies), starting neighborhood consumer co-ops and low-level food production and distribution networks, developing low-capital alternative energy technologies, preventative health care clinics staffed by lay practitioners and midwives, and Community Sponsored Agriculture programs. Obviously, we have a long way to go, but our views are slowly becoming part of public awareness.

Most importantly, we are recommending that these efforts be co-ordinated and integrated democratically, and designed and implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) comprised of people who will be direct beneficiaries, rather than exclusively by city officials, profiteers, and other so-called development experts. Basically, then, we are making a public insistence across the board that the process of community "development" and organization be opened up to broad sectors of society, and that avenues be created everywhere possible for people to become involved and contribute their intelligence, energy, and sweat.

With the capital leveraged from public and private funding sources, we plan to use CATCH, as a municipal housing association, to buy properties and turn them one-by-one into co-operatives. This entails the development of succinct, complex, and detailed mortgage plans and other financial contingencies. For example, one of the benefits of co-ops is that, rather than pay into the coffers of greedy scumbag real estate speculators and landlords, the co-op dweller pays into her own equity, which represents a share of the total mortgage. Each co-op has to work out for itself how equity is paid out, but what CATCH will recommend will be a 2-year minimum commitment, before which time if a co-op'er moves out he will not receive any of his shares back. He will, in that case, have to consider his input as a donation to the co-op. Given that co-op fees will be substantially lower than the average rent charged in Bloomington, both parties end up gaining in such a scenario. But if another dweller stays longer, and moves out after 5 or 6 years, than she gets the major portion of her equity back out of the co-op. That does not mean, of course, that she gets all the money back she put into it, as much of it goes for emergency repairs, maintenance, insurance, utilities, etc. But she will get a portion of the mortgage payment back as her own equity. Still another dweller might be living there when the mortgage is paid off, and will have the option of being a partial owner of the dwelling.

A co-op is at root, then, an economic arrangement among people, and a basic way to alleviate the lack of affordable housing. The arrangements among individuals need not rise to any greater complexity. Indeed, any kind of building, from standard houses to apartment buildings, motels, mobile home courts, and warehouses can be commandeered for co-operative purposes, so long as the basic economic principles apply.

However, co-operative arrangements can be much more than economic. They can be social, cultural, and political as well, and every group of individuals will design their own particular mix of these concerns. Co-ops, particularly ones wherein common spaces exist for mingling, performing tasks or projects, sharing child care, cooking, and eating, provide excellent models for working social arrangements grounded in mutual aid and support, solidarity, co-operation and sharing, self-respect and respect for others.

Once CATCH acquires a property to develop into a co-op, that property will be jacked out of the real estate circuit permanently. The Community Land Trust (CLT), operated by CATCH, requires that all imporvements and physical facilities atop the Land TrustÑincluding the co-opsÑmust be controlled democratically for the good of the community. This does not divest the residents of control over their living situation, but rather insures that the houses may not be sold on the open market. In fact, a CLT will enhance resident and community control of the housing stock, as it will create permanently affordable, democratically controlled housing. Ultimately, this will re-orient our standard notions about housing. Opposed to the fettish of the private proprietor and the atomized house participating in a "free" market, and rejecting equally state ownership and control of housing, CATCH and other like organizations see housing as a human right, and the maintenacne of the housing stock as a community obligation. NGOs such as CATCH want to find the right balance between the needs and desires of the individual and the health of the communityÑa balance which neither the state or capitalists will ever be capable of creating, as the scale is intimate and decentralized.

The details of the processes outlined above are innumerable and can not be adequately covered here, but any interested individuals or groups should contact the addresses I have listed for more information. CATCH will also be glad to provide copies of our brochure, by-laws, and platform statement, meeting minutes samples, and other goodies, provided you send us a few stamps to help cover postage. After all, we are a very poor organization!

What is the use of this approach for anarchists? To begin with, Bloomie anarchists tend to define the most significant, real, and immediate problems, to develop tools and strategies for attacking those problems, and to encourage and aid broad political participation in the forging of solutions.

Housing is just one area wherein real and immediate problems can be challenged: other areas include food production and distribution, plant closings/de-industrialization and the re-organization of "work," child care, and health care. It is our desire to situate ourselves within these struggles and to work for anti-authoritarian, non-statist solutionsÑwhich does NOT mean, by the way, refusing Federal monies. If the defense, petrochemical, and timber industries are not subtle about taking government monies, why should we be? After all, it is OUR wealth produced by OUR toil and creative energies.

However, the terms by which we accept this kind of money militate against standard Liberal posturings on welfare. First of all, we do not intend to re-create the welfare net or become another overburdened social service agency. Our organizations should be self-help in nature, and composed of people who will directly benefit from participation and struggle. Furthermore, we should devise strategies which will increase rather than decrease our reliance on mutual aid and support, as well as maximize political participation. Finally, we should use public monies only on projects that will be self-sustaining, insofar as they will not depend on continual infusion of government aid, but rather on the mobilization of the creative energies of broad and previously de-politicized sectors of our community.

In a larger context, we see ourselves as part of a diverse and energetic international movement of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) both within core capitalist nations like the U.S., and throughout the Third World. CATCH, as an NGO, sees its mission in tandem with that of most NGOs around the globe: to mobilize people into self-help organizations, to channel energies and funds away from profiteers and elites into projects designed at the grass roots level, on a small and intimate scale, and to create accountable and face-to-face quasi-institutional bodies in order to solve the multiple and complex problems created by capitalism and statism. In other words, housing solutions, like other solutions, should not be devised and directed by private profiteers or the state, but by non-profit NGOs and other groups that rely on people power from start to finish. (Two primary reasons for the failure of the modern Liberal housing development process that occured in the 1960s were: 1) The high-level, multibillion dollar public-private marriage between US Housing and Urban Development and the Real Estate community, and 2) The complete lack of input by residents in the design, review, implementation, and management phases.)

On the other hand, one of the most glaring ethical problems we face in our work to establish co-op housing is that we are still participating in the housing market, paying mortgages to banks, financing, the whole bit. Even the term "affordable housing" itself is ideologically challenging because it assumes that homes are to be part of a system of commodity exchange, that housing is not produced for use-value but for exchange-value, and must be integrated into this network. Thus, all the while we refuse to profit from housing, others are profiting: home owners profit from selling their mortgages to us, the banks profit by the interest charged on our loans, and politicians profit by using our success as a feather in their capÑas if to say, see, we helped CATCH accomplish their goals so WE are NOT to blame for the housing crisis. If we allow this to happen, then people will think that the system DOES work, that it doesn't need to be scrapped. We do not want to provide an inoculation for the Corporate-Liberal statist establishment.

Nevertheless, it is our belief that the strategies we have developed here are the most pragmatic and useful for addressing the particular housing problems in Bloomington. We recognize that nothing short of a revolution will eliminate the profit-basis of market exchanges for basic human needs. But we are not content to wait for the onrush of utopia, and moreover feel that revolution must be a lengthy process of self-education and organization, so that we can develop democratic, accountable, decentralized organizations/councils/bodies which not only achieve practical goals in the interim, but train us in participatory politics for the future. What is more, organizing co-operatives can go beyond merely reducing people's costs of living; they will, in fact, exist as parallel institutions, with an anti-profit, anti-capitalist ethic built in at the base. Co-op housing will be a grass roots self-education process, a way in which we can learn how to organize and house ourselves locally until such a time arrives where we can do this on a grand scale.

The development of mutual housing associations such as CATCH, and the establishment of co-ops and Community Land Trusts, allows for broad, daily, and direct political participation in the process of housing ourselves. This in itself is a radicalizing process for many, and a chance to see the contrast between ineffectual municipal bureaucracy and concerted people power. Moreover, by tying up houses within a co-op umbrella, we effectively take them out of the speculative market and prevent them from being subdivided into high-rent student housing. In this way, we can act as a re-invigorated bulwark against the gentrification of neighborhoods by developers.

None of this takes the place of other kinds of strategies designed to raise consciousness among ourselves, as well as the costs for developers and profiteers. We NEED groups who are dedicated specifically to disseminating literature and information on gentrification, and who are hell bent on taking direct action against developers. We NEED and must support the efforts of squatters, tenant's rights organizations, and housing advocates. And we must support those who work directly to propagandize for anti-authoritarian solutions or revolution. Nothing we do in our work need contradict what others are doing: the anarchist community ought to recognize the importance of integrated strategies and struggles, and the usefulness of organization on multiple levels. To fail to do this will render us as drab, simplistic, and undistinguished as the ossified old Left.

Addresses and contacts for further information

People's Housing 7510 N. Ashland Chicago, IL 60626

National Association of Housing Co-operatives 1614 King Street Alexandria, VA 22314

North American Students of Co-operation PO Box 7715 Ann Arbor, MI 48107

Institute for Community Economics 57 School Street Springfield, MA 01105-1331

Email: editors@practicalanarchy.org

Updated: April 3, 2000