Does anyone here have experience living in a co-op? I’d like to move into one in New York but I don’t know much about life in a co-op (kinda sounds like the basis for an MTV reality series). From what I’ve read, I’d work five days a week in the co-op’s stores to cover my rent and meals, plus help out with housework around the residences. Anything I should research before moving in? Has anyone had a really bad co-op experience (i.e. cult, scam, etc.)
-wm
I think they used to call them communes in the '60s and '70s. I never lived in one, but there is one called “The Farm”,I think, in Tennessee that has been in operation for 25+ years I think. They have a website that might give you some information.
Not a cult or a scam, but the co-op I lived in for a semester (mid-Eighties) almost went broke because nobody paid the rent or did their chores. They needed a majority vote from the tenants before evicting anyone and no one would vote to evict a friend. Finally, a business major ran for president and led the house back to being a solvent, functional place. I hope it helped on his resume.
Great parties and great stories though, and what little money came in did keep us in homebrewed beer (along with paying for the occasional 40-keg party.)
The Farm does indeed still exist! The guy who founded it, Stephen Gaskin, was a San Francisco hippie during the Summer of Love. He and a bunch of other hippies moved out to rural Tennessee where the land is cheaper and more plentiful, and the community has been there ever since. I nominated Stephen to be the Green Party presidential candidate in 2000 and again for 2004. Not that I don’t like Ralph Nader (I voted for Ralph twice!) I just think there should be a contest for the nomination.
The Grateful Dead song “Saint Stephen” is supposedly about Stephen Gaskin.
The Farm is quite a thriving community, with many small businesses and so on. They have a Peace Corps-type organization called “Plenty” that helps set up community projects both in the US and in other countries. Among other things, they helped set up an ambulance service in a low-income area of New York City. More recently, there are plans to start a combination birthing center/retirement home. The idea is that both the newborn babies and the older people would benefit from being near each other. Stephen’s spouse, Ina May Gaskin, is one of the leading experts in the field of midwifery.
The term that generally gets used these days is “intentional communities,” rather than “communes.”
I lived in a student co-op at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor when I was a graduate student there in 1989-90. I really enjoyed it.