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

