Cheaper by the dozen
With costs on the rise, co-op houses offer an economic advantage, and a social one too

By Emma Brown, Globe Correspondent | August 2, 2008

The smell of pancakes and eggs wafts into the bright ground-floor sitting room of a Fields Corner triple-decker, where Micha Josephy – one of 12 people who own this house collectively and live here cooperatively – ticks off the bottom-line benefits of pooling resources.

Rent varies by room size but averages $565. Food is $135 a person each month, which pays for a fully stocked pantry plus ingredients for six shared meals a week – including Saturday brunch, which is what’s responsible for the aroma. And utilities, the bane of New Englanders’ budgets?

“Fifty dollars [per person] regardless of what month it is, so you don’t get slammed by unexpected heating costs in the winter,” says Josephy, 32, who expects his group might have to raise that rate some time in the next couple of years.

In contrast, fair market rent for a person living alone in a studio apartment in Boston, as determined by the federal government, is $1,086. A single man Josephy’s age cooking and eating at home on a “low-cost” food plan pays $257 a month, according to May 2008 figures from the United States Department of Agriculture. And heating oil costs for the average American household are expected to rise more than 30 percent to $2,593 this winter, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association.

Sharing never sounded so good.

As food prices climb and heating oil prices stick stubbornly above $4.50 a gallon, cooperative houses like this one – scattered throughout the Boston area and long disdained as the province of hippies and other far-out-there types – make more fiscal sense than ever.

“If people knew about these alternatives, then more of them might decide to live this way,” says Joanne Tuller, 53, a psychotherapist and 25-year-veteran of a different Dorchester co-op known as The Big Top.

“Co-op” is a word with many meanings: High-flying executives and celebrities collectively own exclusive co-op apartment buildings in New York City, for example, and some affordable housing projects, including in Boston’s Dudley Triangle, are cooperatively owned. But co-ops such as Tuller’s and Josephy’s, called Seedpod, are social arrangements as much as economic ones: In group-living situations like this one, residents democratically and systematically divvy up household responsibilities such as shopping, cooking, cleaning, and keeping track of finances. Life is cheaper because fixed costs are split among so many people, and because the group can order food in bulk, taking advantage of economies of scale to get more for less.

“It’s the wave of the future,” says Josephy, only half joking. A bearded, bespectacled loan portfolio monitor for the Community Economic Development Assistance Corporation, he helped piece together financing to buy this house, and is working to help members of other group-living co-ops – most of whom rent their shared homes – do the same.

At Seedpod, each person devotes six hours a week to house chores. “That’s not much at all, compared to living on your own,” says Matt Buresh, a 28-year-old outreach worker in mental health, as house members trickle into the dining room for brunch.

The meal’s chefs, Brett Nadan, 27, and Allen Goodman, 24, will record the two hours they spent chopping potatoes and frying pancakes on a spreadsheet that helps the house members keep track of each other’s contributions.

“We never really talk about kicking somebody out because they’re not doing their chores,” says Nadan, a high school teacher. “It’s self-selecting.”

Like many Boston-area co-ops, Seedpod has two refrigerators and a pantry stocked with canned food and big pickle jars repurposed to hold beans, grains, and nuts. They buy mostly organic produce from local farms and farmers’ markets, cook vegetarian meals, and reuse their plastic bags; they make decisions at house meetings by discussion and consensus rather than by vote; and they have methods for making sure dust bunnies get taken care of and dirty dishes don’t pile up – like the wooden board hanging on the wall at Seedpod, where residents move washers along a row of nails to rate each room’s cleanliness and prioritize its cleaning.

Twelve people living in one house sounds crowded; in fact, the 4,100-square-foot home includes three bathrooms – enough so there is rarely competition for a shower – and plenty of space: two porches on each floor, second- and third-floor kitchens converted into an exercise room and study; computer room, dining room, and sitting room; a walk-in closet converted to a tiny guest room, and basement storage space.

Residents say co-ops offer not just enticing economics, but a hedge against urban isolation and a way to split the extra energy it takes to live green.

“You don’t get lonely here,” says Michaela McSweeney, a 26-year-old resident of Beaufort House, a Jamaica Plain co-op of 12 whose yard boasts an impressive set of raised garden beds. Rent there – unlike Seedpod, the Beaufort crowd doesn’t own its house – ranges from $300 to $600 a month, and the combined cost of food and utilities (including heat) falls between $100 to $140, depending on the season.

At Beaufort, instead of driving to the grocery store, someone is assigned to pick up the bulk food order (less packaging) on a bicycle outfitted with a trailer (no carbon dioxide emissions). “It makes it easier to live the way you want to live,” says McSweeney’s housemate, Jesse Posner, 22.

Like Seedpod and Beaufort House, whose residents range in age from early 20s to mid-30s, co-ops tend to attract young people, post-college and pre-marriage.

“That kind of an in-between phase of people’s lives has contributed to the recent surge in popularity of what we’re doing,” says Jim Jones of the North American Students of Cooperation, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based organization that grew out of the 1960s co-operative movement, in which left-leaning university students sought independent, democratically managed housing. It retains its name but extends its training to anyone interested in starting a co-op house.

But not all co-ops are made up of young, transient types. All six residents at the Williams Street Co-op in Somerville are over 50. One co-op in Dorchester is home to a married couple, their two daughters, and two single adults. The four adults own and manage the house.

No one knows how many co-ops actually exist in and around Boston – nine appear on the Boston Co-op Network website, others advertise for roommates on Craigslist, and regularly, new ones pop up and old ones fold. But Josephy and others are optimistic that there is room here for this model to expand.

“Social support networks and living with people is a way to sort of fill in the gap with what we think of as a traditional family,” says Holly Jo Sparks, 32, who is studying for a master’s degree in city planning at MIT. Formerly the executive director of NASCO, she helped Josephy’s group morph from a rental co-op into homeowners.

That meant incorporating as a nonprofit called Boston Community Cooperatives, writing a business plan, and convincing friends, relatives, and reluctant banks to loan the money for Seedpod, which cost $512,000 in 2005. Now, a percentage of each member’s monthly rent is funneled to house maintenance and capital improvement funds; the rest goes toward paying down the mortgage. A member gets his deposit back upon moving out, but equity stays with the nonprofit.

Most Boston-area co-ops, which are concentrated in student districts and low-rent neighborhoods, are rentals – but ownership, which residents at Seedpod pay for when they move in with a $565 deposit, has its benefits, including stability and plain old control over your own space.

“Having the power to make decisions about your own property – that’s a really big thing for a lot of people,” says NASCO’s Jones. “They haven’t had that power before.”

Emma Brown can be reached at ebrown@globe.com.
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