Wednesday, November 22, 2017 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, November 22, 2017 // The Statement
5B
A home, not a house
A look at Ann Arbor’s historic co-ops
by Lara Moehlman, Managing Statement Editor
H
ot air wafts from the oven
in the kitchen of Linder
Cooperative House, which
looks semi-industrial with
steel gray appliances. A hooded stove and
two picnic benches tucked under a wood-
en table back into the far right corner of a
chipping, bright orange wall. My Chemi-
cal Romance’s “Teenagers” has been
playing at full volume, on loop. It’s almost
7 p.m. and the Linder House co-chefs pre-
pare dinner for the co-op’s 20 residents.
Recent alum Shannon Stone takes a pair
of Speedo goggles dangling from a nail in
the wall above us and pulls them over her
eyes before continuing with the onions.
Her movements are methodical and effi-
cient. She knows where everything is
because each cabinet, each drawer and
each refrigerator shelf is clearly labeled
with masking tape and a black Sharpie:
utensils, plates, bulk foods, bulk vegetar-
ian foods. She cooks dinner for the same
20 people three times a week.
For Stone, living in a co-op wasn’t as
much of a choice as it was a necessity.
“I couldn’t afford to live anywhere
else,” she said, explaining her $600
monthly rent couldn’t be matched by any
housing on or off the University of Michi-
gan’s campus.
To be clear, that $600 covers not only
her room but also her food and, in some
cases, even her toiletries. GUFF, short
for Generally Unrestricted Free Food, is
a term used throughout the Inter-Coop-
erative Council for communal items. At
Linder, there is a box of GUFF clothing
filled with used T-shirts, coats and pants,
a GUFF pantry and refrigerator stocked
with both weekly groceries and bulk-
stored meats, nonperishables and frozen
vegetables. The house’s four bathrooms
hold crates full of GUFF shampoos, con-
ditioners and soaps. If she doesn’t go out
to eat for the month, $600 is Shannon’s
cost of living.
*****
Linder House was officially incor-
porated and bought by the ICC in 1989,
though the house itself was built in 1894
and previously housed several other
communities, including Phi Chi frater-
nity and the Keystone Club — a teen divi-
sion of the Boys & Girls Clubs.
The house is named after Benjamin
Linder, an engineer from Seattle who
traveled in 1987 to rural northern Nica-
ragua to build hydroelectric dams for a
public works organization to bring elec-
tricity to underprivileged communities.
While working in Nicaragua, he was
assassinated by an anti-Communist rebel
group known as the Contras, which at the
time received significant funding from
the United States government. A mural
painted over a bright orange wall in the
house’s living room shows Linder himself
working on a dam as rebel forces dressed
in black litter the jungle around him.
It’s clear Linder’s legacy of social jus-
tice and activism lives on in the house
today. Flyers display everything from
LGBT rights activism to support of the
Black Lives Matter movement. In late
2016, several Linder residents traveled to
Standing Rock, N.D., to participate in the
protest of the construction of the Dakota
Access Pipeline.
A strong tradition of socialist values
also permeates Linder.
Once or twice a month, residents
convene to vote on house policy and
other matters. Each resident holds one
vote and, together, they determine the
month’s food budget, how many vegetar-
ian meals they will eat, when to plan the
next party and even which newspapers to
buy subscriptions for. The meetings also
serve as a time for open communication
and house conflict resolution. Last year,
the house voted on designated spaces in
which members can be nude. The kitchen
was ruled off limits.
Monthly rent at luxury high rises start
at $900 and might create the illusion that
houses and smaller buildings around
them will experience less demand and
therefore offer lower rent, but a study
commissioned by the Washtenaw Coun-
ty Office of Community and Economic
Development in January 2015 shows
that’s not true. At an October town hall
meeting for members of both the Uni-
versity’s Central Student Government
and Ann Arbor City Council, Teresa Gil-
lotti, the Washtenaw County housing and
infrastructure manager, said 56 percent
of tenants in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti
pay 30 percent or more of their income
on rent. Because the University guaran-
tees housing only for first-year students,
many are consequently pushed farther
and farther from their academic build-
ings in search of affordable housing.
*****
The first Cooperative House in Ann
Arbor was established by graduate stu-
dents in the University’s Student Social-
ist Club during the Great Depression.
Filling a single house on East Ann Street
in Kerrytown, members kept their living
expenses at $2 per week by jointly buying
the property and communally sharing
housework. The house was run by demo-
cratic meetings, in which each member
had an equal say in house affairs. In the
following eight decades, the co-op sys-
tem has grown to include 16 houses on
both Central and North Campuses.
The formal Inter-Cooperative Coun-
cil, which currently maintains the sys-
tem’s 16 houses, was established in 1937
and was run by a board of directors com-
prised of representatives from each exist-
ing house. In 1951, the system, which was
previously entirely student-run, voted on
a referendum to hire a full-time execu-
tive secretary to carry out accounting
and the supervision of purchasing along
with carrying out board instructions.
The current ICC functions as a nonprofit
and has since grown to a staff office of
around ten adult professionals.
Michigan House, a bright blue house
on North State Street, was purchased by
the ICC in 1947, and has been a mainstay
within the system for decades. House
meeting minutes contain notes of a can-
celed meeting the day President John
Kennedy was shot. Currently, Michigan
House is jointly run with Minnie’s coop-
erative House, a bright purple monstros-
ity visible from the window directly to
its right. Residents of both houses eat
together (in Michigan House) and attend
house meetings together as a result.
According to the Michigan House Pre-
amble and Constitution, Minnie’s was
once a boarding house run by a woman
named Minnie Wallace, who ran away
with a nudist taxi driver. The house was
purchased by the ICC in 1970 and paint-
ed Dauphine Purple — Minnie’s favorite
color.
Situated at the angular intersection of
Hill Street and Washtenaw Avenue across
from the Rock, Luther House traces its
history to the radical activism and coun-
terculture that persisted on college cam-
puses from the 1960s through the 1970s.
The house was home to the “White Pan-
ther Party” — an anti-racist political col-
lective parallel to the Black Panther Party
— and its founder John Sinclair, who
would go on to be manager of the rock
band MC5.
Yet in addi-
tion to its rich
history,
Luther
House at its core
is a home and
community
for
its current resi-
dents. Any given
day you’ll find
residents sitting
on
the
porch,
and the house is
famous four its
annual
massive
Halloween party
featuring a local
Ann Arbor band.
LSA
sopho-
more
Melissa
Newman signed
a lease in Luther
House
after
her other hous-
ing
plans
fell
through
last-
minute. She was
familiar
with
the co-op sys-
tem because her
brother lived in
a co-op at Mich-
igan State University, and she thought it
might be a fun alternative to independent
living. Throughout this past semester,
she’s additionally come to appreciate the
comforting transition from dorm life the
ICC offers from dorm life.
“A dorm is a nice transition from living at
home to sort of living alone, because you don’t
have to deal with food, you don’t have to deal
with a lot of budgeting,” Newman said. “So
from living in the dorms to doing everything
on your own, I think that’s a really big jump,
and the co-op is a good in-between.”
Though she admits sometimes fulfilling
her inflexible chore hours seems inconve-
nient, she concedes the cooperative system is
most likely more efficient than independent
living in the long run.
“I do think it probably ends up being
that you do less work or an equal amount of
work you would do anyway,” Newman said.
“Because if you have your own house, you’re
cleaning the kitchen and making all these
meals and that’s really time-consuming,
whereas here all that stuff is done for you.
And when you do a task it’s just more focused.
Instead of it being ‘I have to clean the entire
house,’ it’s ‘I have to clean the kitchen on
Wednesday.’ ”
Ultimately, Newman praised the system’s
priority of affordability in the city’s competi-
tive housing market.
“The ICC is really great in that their prior-
ity is keeping rent low and being that option
for students,” she said.
Today, the organization’s socialist roots
are visible in its continued student self-gov-
ernment and ownership.
Unlike in his past jobs in nonprofit man-
agement, Nick Coquillard, the general man-
ager of the ICC, is not directly in charge.
“I’m basically a very glorified adviser,” he
said. “The best part of my gig is that I get to
work with so many leaders in the houses that
get to be the leaders who run the co-ops.”
A framed drawing that reads “I love my
co-op” sits behind his desk.
Coquillard added that the ICC experienc-
es some pressure from newer, more expen-
sive housing options in Ann Arbor each year
to update the mostly outdated technology,
appliances and furniture found in each of its
houses — renovations that the ICC must take
into consideration rather slowly in an effort
to curb rising member fees.
“We’re always facing the cost and the
effort and the time of maintaining our homes
while staying affordable,” he said. But though
he said the speed of cooperation inherent in
a purely democratic system could be slow, he
said he loves his job.
“It’s amazing — the group of students and
people that are in charge of this. They real-
ly care and they really want to further the
cooperative movement. It’s just a really fun
place to work.”
*****
Back at Linder House, Stone rolls chunks
of pink, raw turkey meat into sizable balls
and places them on an oven tray. When the
meat is cooked, she pulls a rope from an old-
fashioned bell that hangs from the counter.
Promptly, about 11 or 12 Linder residents fill
the small kitchen and neatly fill their plates
before sitting down at the picnic-style bench-
es. The wall behind the table holds shelves
with small crates with index-card names
on them — each contains an individual resi-
dent’s “non-GUFF” food items.
She said though joining a co-op was a
financial necessity for her, over time it’s
become so much more than that. She now
considers cooperative living her favorite
part of college, as it has provided her with a
greater sense of community. She made her
best friends living and working in different
co-ops, and said she can’t imagine her college
years without the constancy of coming home
each night for house dinners.
“There’s an emotional significance
I attach to this house that I don’t think
many college students can say they have
about any particular place,” Stone said
before sitting down to dinner. “It’s more
than just a house. It’s a home.”
Alexis Rankin/Daily
High-rise apartments in Ann Arbor.
Alexis Rankin/Daily
Inter-Cooperative Council.
Alexis Rankin/Daily
Minnie’s Co-Op Housing