Different smaller housing types other than large apartments

Micro-apartments.   The Boston Globe ("Micro-apartments will become a cost-effective solution for renters — eventually"), reports on the provision of small apartments in the city, 450 s.f. or less, with kitchens and community amenities.  They are a form of what used to be called SRO, or Single Room Occupancy housing, but flashier.  (Also see this BG article from 2015, "Developers, city hope tiny apartments will keep families in Boston").

From the current article:

The idea of living in a micro-unit, or an apartment roughly less than 400 square feet, might send some renters heading for the wide-open spaces of the suburbs. But for others, a small, manageable, and ideally affordable living space would make living closer to downtown feel more approachable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the affordability piece that Bostonians are still seeking.

In 2016, the city’s Housing Innovation Lab rolled out a traveling model apartment called the Urban Housing Unit, or UHU. At 385 square feet, this micro-apartment traveled to eight neighborhoods across the city, showing Bostonians what life in such a small space could look like. During its tour, the Housing iLab gathered feedback from roughly 2,000 residents to help draft guidelines for a compact living program.

... “We worked with the city of Boston to create these compact-living regulations that changed the [square footage] downward and basically made it so that it was more like an open-ended thing,” Roy said. “You had to just show it to the Boston Planning Department, go through the design, and make sure that you fulfilled certain requirements — there’s some storage, there’s a decent kitchen, there’s a place to put your bed, and there’s a certain amount of light and air.”

... Six years later, micro-units have proliferated throughout Boston — like the ones for rent at Micropolis in Beacon Hill and the studios at Troy Boston in the South End — but they aren’t quite nailing the goal of UHU yet. That’s because many of the micro-apartments for rent today aren’t exactly affordable. A 250-square-foot unit at Micropolis, for example, fetches more than $2,000 per month.

 ... Smaller homes can present advantages, too. Though there’s a shortage of space, there’s also less cleaning and maintenance to be done, Salpoglou said. Utility bills will be smaller, and you’ll likely be buying less “stuff,” like furniture, accessories, and things that might constitute clutter. “There’s no question there’s an added benefit to them,” he said.

... It’s the kind of project Roy thinks could benefit Boston, along with more cohousing models. Both would serve demographics like workforce singles and couples, graduate students, single parents, divorcées, the elderly, artists, and recent immigrants, which make up many of the groups currently priced out of Boston’s housing stock. 

“There has to be a way for the city and the state to subsidize nonprofit development to do this,” Roy said. “It’s necessary for the workforce — for people who don’t make $100,000 a year and just need a place to live.”

What I think's interesting about the initiative is the prototyping they did.  There definitely is a need to extend the range of housing choices available to people, especially singles.  Cost of new housing is an issue, so subsidy might be required.   And it is a way to add "gentle density" to a community, especially if such buildings are built in areas with good transit and other amenities.

Two adjacent rowhouses on Chapin Street NW were combined and renovated to form the first Cohabs building in D.C. There is no signage to suggest that the building is different from the other houses on the block. (Aaron Wiener/The Washington Post)

Co-living.  In "Can 35 roommates cure loneliness? This co-living housing firm thinks so," the Washington Post discusses a firm opening a more expensive of group housing that they call co-housing.  From the article:

Brussels-based Cohabs is buying up properties in D.C. with the aim of converting them into “co-living” spaces, where as many as 36 housemates will share common areas, events and — according to the firm’s marketing — a cure for urban loneliness.

The company opened its first D.C. house last month. The property, formerly two adjacent rowhouses in Columbia Heights, has been turned into a warren of 36 bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, two full kitchens, six kitchenettes and two roof decks.

Cohabs has purchased five other properties in D.C. and is aiming for more. In 2025, the company plans to buy a building a month, according to U.S. managing director Daniel Clark. “We could go pretty quickly to 500 beds, and I think 1,000 beds is possible,” Clark said.

... Those rents include cleaning services, utilities, periodic group breakfasts and events, a full-size bed and other furnishings, and basic communal supplies such as toilet paper, soap and olive oil. 

According to the article, other firms offer a similar kind of experiential housing elsewhere in the city, while the WeLive spin off from WeWork failed. 

It does seem like a good way to add housing density without new construction or teardowns of existing historic building stock.  It extends the range of housing types available--not everyone wants their own apartment.  The programming is a nice touch for people more interested in experiences.

The New York Times article refers to co-living as "dorms for adults," ("As Housing Costs Soar, Co-Living Makes a Comeback").

Co-housing.  I was confused at first, thinking they were calling it co-housing.  I've visited the co-housing development in Takoma DC.  The building is U shaped, with separate attached buildings, like rowhouses, with a commonspace in the middle including kitchen, dining, and other facilities.  But each housing unit has its own facilities: kitchen, washer and dryer ("There’s Community and Consensus. But It’s No Commune," New York Times).  

But the intent, like the Cohabs version, is to promote interaction, which isn't necessarily the case with group housing, unless people already know each other.  From the NYT article, "Modern Housing With Village Virtues":

Louise Dunlap, 78, has rented a studio apartment in a nine-unit cohousing community for the last six years. “Interdependence,” she says, “goes beyond turning the compost and fixing the washing machine. I get a chance to share meals and deep conversations. There’s a kind of love that grows out of these connections — not romantic love, not family love, but something about our common humanity. I wish everyone could experience this.”

The problem with co-housing is that the first wave of residents are fully committed, while tenants are replaced individually as units go up for sale, and new residents don't necessarily have the same commitment.  Another problem is financing the building in the first place ("They Took a Chance on Collaborative Living. They Lost Everything," NYT).

Co-operatives.  There are two types of co-operative housing.  One is more communal, the other has separate apartments or buildings, with zero focus on co-living.   For example, in Ann Arbor, there are a large number of communal co-ops serving as a form of student housing.  They prepare common meals, at least for dinner, using an in-building commercial kitchen, and have joint spaces for living, with individual small rooms and shared bathrooms.  Rather than jobbing out cleaning etc. like the co-living spaces, the residents do this collectively.

Single Room Occupancy ("Single-room rentals in America's housing ecosystem," Niskanen Center, Single Room Occupancy Task Force Report, Hennepin County).  Units were significantly smaller than co-living options, with a size of 80 to 140 s.f. on average, with shared restrooms and a living room.  Rooms often had a small kitchenette with a hot plate, not a full stove.  

Many cities have seen a small rebirth of the SRO type as a way to address homelessness.

Boarding houses.  A variant of SROs was boarding houses, which included dinner for sure and maybe breakfast.

October is Co-op Month

I visited a food cooperative, Coopportunity Market and Deli.

The store in Culver City, California is part of a two-store group with the other in Santa Monica (which I haven't visited) and something in the store reminded me.

 -- 2019 Co-op Month

Part of a mixed use development with housing above, and proximate to freeways, major arterials but also across the street from the Expo Line Culver City Station and visible from the line, it was a knock out store.

The nicest (or another way to put it might be "the most upscale") food cooperative I've ever seen, with the way the store was organized being superior even to the group of PCC Community Markets food cooperative stores headquartered in but not limited to Seattle or the separate Central Co-op in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. (Greater Minneapolis also has a preponderance of food cooperatives but I haven't been there in years.)

It had great deli, bakery, produce, and beer and wine sections, and fabulous indoor and outdoor seating areas.

Maybe because they had a traditional and well-respected retail design firm help them.

I haven't been to the Common Market co-op in Frederick, Maryland, but the store promotion materials they produce, including a regular bi-monthly newsletter called Spoonful, are excellent.

Most of the other food cooperatives I've been to merely distribute materials like the Delicious Living magazine which heavily hypes vitamins and supplements (natural foods markets make a lot of money off this stuff, even though research tends to indicate they don't have much positive effect).

So it's worth revisiting some past writings on food cooperatives:

-- "Food co-ops as potential anchors of "ethical commercial districts," 2011
-- "Pogue's Run Grocer food cooperative, Indianapolis," 2018
-- "The lost opportunity of the Takoma Food Co-op as a transformational driver for the Takoma Junction district," 2018

And on Cooperative Month in general, this round up piece from last year:

-- October is Co-operative Month

Saturday October 19th is Food Cooperative Day in Philadelphia ("Cooperative businesses foster human connection in an increasingly isolated world," Grid Magazine).

October is Co-operative Month

Only because I came across a recent edition of the Greenbelt News-Review community newspaper did I learn that October is 2018 CO-OP Month.

There is an exhibition on the National Mall in Washington DC this weekend called the

-- 2018 Co-op Festival

They expect 20,000+ attendees and more than 25 exhibitors.

From time to time I write about co-operatives in the context of retail, not so much in planning.  There are two types of co-operatives.  Business cooperatives organize people/firms together to conduct business, while community cooperatives organize individuals together to conduct joint activities on a non-profit basis.

-- Cooperatives for a Better World

1. Communities as cooperatives: Greenbelt, Maryland.  But with planning, Greenbelt, Maryland has an interesting history in both cooperative housing and the development and maintenance of cooperative businesses, such as the community supermarket.

-- The Greenbelt Cooperative: Success and Decline, Cooper and Mohn, University of California Center for Cooperatives, 1992

The Greenbelt Museum is a public museum interpreting the history of the community.

2. Housing cooperatives.  The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has a strong co-operative housing network for student housing, which in turn has helped to support the development of non-student housing cooperatives elsewhere in the city. For a long time, the "trade association" North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO) was based in the University of Michigan Student Union, although now it's based in Chicago.

The famous Dakota "apartment" building in Manhattan is a cooperative.

Multiunit buildings organized as cooperatives are a form of high-income housing that tends to be present in larger cities like New York City.

It's also seen as an opportunity as a way to deliver permanently affordable housing.

-- National Association of Housing Cooperatives
-- "Housing cooperatives in the USA," NAHC
-- "Limited Equity Housing Cooperatives: A review of the literature

3. Utility cooperatives.  Some rural areas created utility cooperatives to deliver electricity and phone service.

4.  Business-to-business cooperatives.  In many places, farmers have organized cooperatives to conduct business activities on behalf of all the members. Land O Lakes butter is produced by a cooperative.  So are Sunkist citrus fruits.

The Bike Cooperative is an organization that supports independent bicycle retailers.

Retail buying groups are a form of business cooperative.

5.  Coops as a way to maintain retail businesses in rural communities.  In the UK, the Plunkett Foundation and in the US the Center for Cooperatives at University of Nebraska Extension have active programs promoting community cooperative organizing efforts as a way to maintain rural retail.

-- "The need for a new rural community cooperative movement," 2017

6.  Food cooperatives are probably the most widespread example of retail-community focused cooperatives.  Supermarket business organizations like Wakefern (Shoprite), IGA, and Associated Food Stores of Utah are examples of business cooperatives serving individual members, although sometimes these organizations own stores as well as supply members.

-- books

Retail/community food cooperatives that people think of when they think of such things are more like the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn ("History of the Park Slope Food Coop," Grub Street), Weavers Way in Philadelphia, etc.  Minneapolis-St. Paul and Seattle are known for having a large number of attractive and successful food co-ops. In Seattle, it's mostly the Pacific Consumers Co-p, although there are others.

-- National Cooperative Grocers Association

They aren't easy to organize.  I remember one effort that came to nought in the H Street neighborhood c. 2003-6.  A group is trying to organize one in Salt Lake City currently, the Wasatch Cooperative Market.

7.  Bike co-ops are another type of community organization effort, where people come together to operate programs to provide bike repair and service to community members.

8.  Co-ops as an option for retail delivery in urban underserved communities.  I've argued this can be a way to seed retail in revitalizing communities of all types, including large cities.

The Pogue's Run Co-op in the neighborhood of East Indianapolis and Mariposa Co-op on Baltimore Avenue in Philadelphia are examples.

-- "Pogue's Run Grocer food cooperative, Indianapolis," 2018

9. Food co-ops as anchors of mixed use development. Seattle, Rochester and Minneapolis in Minnesota, and other cities are prominent examples of food co-operatives as anchors of mixed use developments. Sadly, that's not likely to be happening with the Takoma Park-Silver Spring Food Co-op here.

-- "The lost opportunity of the Takoma Food Co-op as a transformational driver for the Takoma Junction district," 2018

10.  Food cooperatives as anchors for fair trade retail districts.  Although, generally, food cooperatives tend to be located in higher income neighborhoods as their organizers tend to be values-driven consumers.

I've written about Weavers Way Co-op in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia and how it demonstrates that cooperatives can be anchors of fair trade oriented commercial districts.

-- "Weavers Way co-op looks back at 40 years in Mt. Airy," WHYY-FM/NPR
-- "Food co-ops as potential anchors of "ethical commercial districts," 2013

11.  Employee-owned retail business cooperatives: formal.  Interestingly, the Glut Food Co-op in Mount Rainier, Maryland is a business cooperative, organized by the original founders as an employee owned business functioning as a cooperative. Red Emma's Bookstore in Baltimore is organized the same way.

12.  Employee-owned retail business cooperatives: informal. It's no longer in operation, but the way that the old Silver Spring Bookstore was organized was like an employee owned coop.  Three people came together, recognizing that they couldn't mount a successful store on their own. What they did was coded each book to who "owned it" and shared responsibilities for operating the store during working hours, and split the proceeds depending on whose books sold.

13.  The National Co-operative Bank as a lender.  The NCB lends money to business coops, housing coops, etc.  I've argued they're a potential resource for mixed use developments involving food cooperatives.

-- "Strengthening Communities through the Power of Cooperation: National Cooperative Bank," Cooperatives for a Better World

Carving out the Commons: book talk today at American University (and tomorrow in Baltimore)

Unbeknownst to me, independent research Amanda Huron has written a book about DC's limited equity low income housing co-ops, which is opportune given my recent writings on the topic, including "Not particularly radical: housing ideas from Right to the City."

From the book's website at the University of Minnesota:

Amanda Huron will be at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center on Wednesday, April 4 at 4:00 p.m. for a reading and signing of her new book, Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C..

Carving Out the Commons theorizes the practice of urban “commoning” in Washington, D.C., through an investigation of the city’s limited-equity housing cooperatives. It asks whether a commons can work in a city where land and resources are scarce and how strangers who may not share a past or future come together to create commonly held spaces in the midst of capitalism.

"Through interviews and historical research, Amanda Huron gives us an in-depth description of the formation of a housing cooperative in Washington, D.C. in the ’70s and develops a theoretical structure enabling us to generalize this experience to other cities. It is an incisive book that speaks to a vital issue in contemporary politics and social theory."—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation

"Amanda Huron illuminates new ways of thinking what social justice in the city can look like. Her writing is rigorous yet upholds the dignity of the people she studies and their attempts to stake out a right to their city. Carving Out the Commons will be a go-to both for academics and organizers in the coming years."—James Tracy, author of Dispatches Against Displacement: Field Notes from San Francisco's Housing Wars

She's also speaking in Baltimore tomorrow, at Red Emma's Bookstore and Café. Coincidentally, Red Emma's is a workers cooperative.

Not particularly radical: housing ideas from Right to the City

NotionsCapital calls our attention to an article  (" Radical Real Estate Ideas To Fix Our Broken Housing System") in Fast Company on the "Right to the City" manifesto on how to expand affordable housing options in the context of the hyperstrong market in many center cities.

From the article:

Permanently affordable, inclusive housing models like community land trusts (CLTs)–represent a tiny portion of the housing stock, but if it could go mainstream, they could give people the affordable options they need and the market can’t provide.

That’s the crux of a new report from the Right to the City Alliance, a nonprofit focused on creating equitable urban areas, and its Homes for All Campaign, which advocates for affordable, dignified housing for all. “Communities Over Commodities: People-Driven Alternatives To An Unjust Housing System” details four models of “decommodified housing” (in other words, housing that is a place to live, not an investment vehicle) that have proven, in other countries, to provide stability to families struggling to afford a place to live.

The four types are:

-- Limited equity cooperatives
-- Community Land Trusts
-- Tenement Syndicates
-- Mutual Aid Cooperatives.

Cooperatives.  Because I went to college in Ann Arbor, where there is a strong set of cooperatives functioning as housing for college students (Inter-Cooperative Council at Ann Arbor), some cooperative housing developments dating to the 1960s/1970s, and NASCO, a national cooperative promotion organization that was based in the Student Union but is now in Chicago, housing cooperatives don't seem particularly radical to me, especially because as a form of housing, they exist in plenty of cities.

I suppose co-housing is a kind of variant, as what is called an "intentional community." There's a co-housing development in the Takoma neighborhood of DC, which is at least 15 years old.

But cooperative housing dates to the 1920s, with housing projects initiated by Labor Unions and other groups.  New York City is well known too for its upscale cooperative buildings, where the board must approve of each new tenant before a sale can go through. 

The DC Cooperative Housing Association represents 100 market rate buildings and 15,000 units of housing.  The city also has a number of low income housing cooperatives, including 1417 N Street NW.  Some are financed by the DC Department of Housing and Community Development.

-- "A Brief History of Affordable Housing Cooperatives in the United States," Gerald Sazama University of Connecticut
-- National Association of Housing Cooperatives
-- COOPERATIVE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT TOOLBOX: A Guide for Successful Community Development, Northcounty Cooperative Foundation
-- COOPERATIVE HOUSING DEVELOPMENT TOOLBOX: A GUIDE FOR SUCCESSFUL COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT, Northcounty Cooperative Foundation
-- Developing Cooperatives: The NYC Experience, Urban Homesteading Assistance Board
-- Cooperative Housing International
-- Profiles of a Movement: Housing Co-operatives around the world

Community land trusts were discussed in the book, Streets of Hope : The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood, about the Dudley Street Neighborhood revitalization effort in the Roxbury district of Boston.  The book dates to 1994, and I read it about 15 years ago. There's also a documentary, "Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street" by New Day Films."

The Dudley Neighbors Land Trust owns the land for 95 units of permanently affordable owner occupied houses--which have restrictions requiring the sale of the property to people of a certain income level, and has 77 cooperative housing units and 53 rental units.

Note that CLTs are also used as a way to preserve open space and agricultural lands.

-- "Community Land Trusts and the Fight Against Gentrification," The Atlantic
-- Community land trusts, urban land reform, and the commons, Commons Transition

Tenement syndicates are kind of like cooperative rental buildings, and that's a bit more radical, although I think it's a stretch to think about them as being founts of democracy. If you could create a community development corporation to create such buildings, that would be a bit more radical. My understanding is that Jubilee Housing of DC does some work along these lines. They do assist people in creating cooperatives, and they have organized cooperative apartment projects for lower income residents.

Mutual aid cooperatives are sort of like Habitat for Humanity. There, people contribute effort towards building a house that they're going to buy. MACs involve owners not just in operating the housing once it's built, but in constructing it too.

Truly radical recommendations.  What would have been really radical is (1) calling on the National Cooperative Bank (2) to create a national fund and initiative (3) for construction of Limited equity cooperatives, Tenement Syndicates, and Mutual Aid Cooperatives, (4) at scale, (5) in communities where housing costs are rapidly rising, (6) by working with designated organizations in each community.

Scale is key.  For example the number of units controlled by the land trust in Roxbury is 225, which probably is not significant enough to have much impact on the housing market there, although it is extremely important to the 225 households participating in the program.  The aforementioned 1417 N Street NW building has 83 units in a single building.

(7) Also radical would be the insertion of social housing creation requirements into large scale master planning initiatives.  There is frequently a tension between "inclusionary zoning" residents and non-subsidized residents in mixed housing over monthly condo fees and other matters.  One way to limit this kind of tension is to create buildings that are 100% affordable, which remain so.

A different kind of "radical action" would be to change master planning of large scale tracts so that rather than rely on and expect all the development to be by traditional for profit developers, set up the program so that some parcels are automatically provided to social housing developers. That's what's done in cities like Helsinki. Here the concept could be expanded to include cooperatives.

The HafenCity development in Hamburg, which is led by a corporation owned by the city government, in addition to providing "subsidized housing" comparable to what we call "inclusionary zoning," they have provided parcels for both cooperatives and what they call "joint building ventures" which are a variant of the tenement syndicate/mutual aid cooperative:

A group of households joins forces to construct a real property which they will then use themselves. They are advised by a construction supervisor. Often joint building ventures are able to realize high-quality living space at prices that are well below going market rates. The building is then divided into individually owned properties.

(8) Technical assistance and monitoring matters too.  Because as small properties, and owned by people with limited resources, problems can multiply and properties can experience significant financial problems.  Managing democratic processes in times of crisis can be very difficult.  See the 2016 blog entry, "The long term potentially negative aspects of condominium buildings as a dominant housing form in cities."

DC and missed opportunities to do social housing as part of large master plans.  By way of a similar kind of opportunity, DC has three very large redevelopment projects underway, at the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center, at the St. Elizabeths east campus, and at the Armed Forces Retirement Home.

But DC master planning processes don't include more specific guidance on providing different housing tenure arrangements nor do they call for the inclusion of such housing when creating plans.  So there aren't plans for that kind of housing at Walter Reed, and probably not at St. Elizabeths.

The AFRH is about to go into redevelopment ("Some of DC's biggest developers interested in Armed Forces Retirement Home," Washington Business Journal) and theoretically that could happen, though not without prodding from the city, which isn't inclined to think in this fashion anyway.