Now that I’m retired and the mortgage is paid off after 30 years concurrently juggling three jobs, I’m wondering what path might have been more affordable and rewarding. My answer: limited equity housing cooperatives.
Let me set the stage:
I was fresh out of graduate school and landed my first job working as an urban planner for the city of Norwalk CT. That’s the good news. The bad news was I was flat broke. Didn’t even have enough for a rental deposit. As luck would have it, I found a rooming house a couple of blocks from the office. The landlord interviewing me in the lobby noted he had a room available in the attic. No kitchen and I had to share the bathroom on the 2nd floor. Behind me as we spoke was a big sign that read “Legal Rooming House, Occupancy for 1st and 2nd floor ONLY”. Like every landlord, he asked “where do you work?”. When I told him it was at the Planning & ZONING office there was a long pause. That’s when we both realized that we needed each other. He needed a quality tenant and I needed a place to live and so began many months of climbing the ladder that led to my fire trap attic room. I noticed that there was no baseboard or radiator so it was unheated but that’s ok since heat rises and the attic never got too cold. I also noticed that there was only 1 window so if there was a fire I envisioned jumping out and landing on the roof over the front door. That scenario worked for me until I realized that flames might be leaping out the 2nd floor windows. Fortunately, such scenarios never occurred. Paying for meals eventually got too expensive so I managed to save up money for another rooming house that was a step up from the current one.
At my second rooming house, I had a kitchenette along with my bedroom. I still had to share a bathroom that was down the hall but like they said in the old TV show “The Jeffersons” I was “moving on up!” This bathroom down the hall was not without its challenges. The woman who lived at the end of the hall had filled it with plants to the point at which it seemed like I was peeing in a jungle. The walls were paper thin and the doors were hollow. Everything could be heard. Arguments, organisms and persons shouting at themselves alone in their rooms. I felt like I was an actor in the movie “One Flew Over The Coocoos Nest”. Many a morning I was woken by the crackle of the police radio as an arrest warrant was being served. It wasn’t all bad. I recall a conversation with a guy down the hall who mentioned how he woke up in Chicago and had no idea how he got there. Nice guy but severe alcoholic who discussed his rifle. I never saw the rifle.
Time again to “move on up”. So, I rented a first-floor apartment with two guys who were about my age. We got along great. In fact, both of them ended up as ushers when I got married a few years later. However, this place was not without some issues. Water leaking thru the ceiling fixture in the kitchen. Water and electricity never a good combination. Wall in shower falling apart. And then there was the guy who lived upstairs. He had a strong resemblance to Chuck Norris and he adapted his persona. His 357 Magnum which he fondly referred to as a “hand cannon” was treated like a family member, actually treated better than his own family.
Time was moving on. People were getting married. Houses were being bought. That’s when I jumped on the opportunity to buy a one-bedroom condominium in Bridgeport CT during the hot condo craze of the 1980’s. Big mistake but then again, I was slowly pursuing the American Dream. I moved from rooming houses to rentals to a condominium. Long story short, the market crashed and so did the neighborhood and the condo which evolved into a rental complex.
By this time, I was married and still pursing that elusive American Dream. Saved up and built a house in the distant suburbs. Another big mistake. Both my late wife and I lost our jobs soon after the house was built and that was about the time my kids arrived. The American Dream turned into a nightmare. Thus began my 30-year odyssey of working three jobs concurrently to stay above the financial water line while every waking minute was spent paying for housing. Went back to renting for one year and bought a fixer upper in a town with a good school system. That town and school system has been good to me. The problem was that the fixer upper never got fixed up. Houses are like humans. They age with time and they must be maintained.
Never had a snowflake chance in hell of ever owning anything in high priced Norwalk CT where at least 15 years of my working career was based. Add another 15 years of working at jobs in even more costly housing priced Stamford CT and I was doomed to be a long-distance commuter.
That brings me around to my fantasizing about how life might have been different had there been an opportunity to invest in a limited-equity housing cooperative in Norwalk. I think about all that commuting that I could have avoided. I could have gotten more engaged in the community where I worked. I could have pursued hobbies, broadened my horizons and maybe even gone on a vacation. In sum, I could have had time to breath and as they say “smell the roses”. I could have secured an affordable roof over my head. I could have had some assurance of not living at the whim of rent increases. I could have not spent over 30 years house-poor pretending that I “owned” a house when actually the bank “owned” me. With Norwalk as my “home base” and assuming that I worked all the jobs I had in Fairfield County, I could have parlayed the savings generated by the affordability of cooperative housing into investment accounts and built up a much more substantial nest egg for retirement.
So why didn’t I follow the limited-equity cooperative housing path?
The simple answer is that they did not exist then and they do not exist in Connecticut today. There are some housing cooperatives in CT but they are few and far between and they are not without issues. I heard there was a cooperative in Norwalk by the name of Dreamy Hollow but it’s anything but dreamy. There’s a massive cooperative housing complex with at least 600 units in Bridgeport named Success Village but its actually a dismal failure. So much so that the site is now bankrupt and in receivership. There’s a cooperative complex in Bridgeport’s south end named Seaside Village and another in Bridgeport’s east end. Both sites are very attractive and almost have a quaint English village appearance. However, they are in neighborhoods suffering from years of deterioration and decline. So much so that it raises questions as to what amount of equity could be built up in the limited-equity cooperative model. A friend of mine checked into cooperatives in another Connecticut city and described the building as prison-like within a very troubled neighborhood.
As a Boomer whose paid off his mortgage and looking to downsize and live out my life, I’m looking for a safe, clean, affordable place where I can ride out into the sunset. The limted equity housing cooperative would match my needs if only I could find one. I’m certainly not alone in these circumstances so it would seem like there would be a demand to create such housing models.
And then there’s my adult children who all are working but have no hope of joining the first rung of the ownership ladder. They are stuck with the choice of paying exorbitant rents and filling the pockets of landlords OR making a housing purchase that will keep them in debt the rest of their life living house poor. They’ve given up that fixation of owning a house in the burbs. They and I are hungry for a lifestyle in which you are not entirely car dependent, you live where there is a sense of community and mutual support and you have more time to breath.
If only there were limited equity housing cooperatives back when I was a young man. If only there are such places today for my own kids for the next generation.
Dunn Writes Well 