[lbo-talk] PBS special on socialist housing co-ops

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at aapt.net.au
Tue Apr 28 18:13:29 PDT 2009


At 5:02 PM -0700 28/4/09, B. wrote:


>http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/athomeinutopia/

This snippet in the story rings a bell:

There came a time when the Co-ops needed to raise the monthly rent by $1 per room to meet the terms of a mortgage. The residents voted against the increase. As a result, the mortgage deal collapsed and a company called the BX Corp. took over the apartments. That was more than 60 years ago. ----

I remember a similar experience in the previous housing co-operative I was in. For the first few years everything went well financially. The bank balance grew, there were few problems.

Trouble is, the rents never increased, years went by and costs increased, but the rent stayed the same. Eventually I tried to raise the alarm after the second year in a row of our expenditure exceeding income by $10,000.

We still had $20,000 in the bank, so no-one was too bothered. It all seemed very academic I suppose.

But for the next year I kept nagging that we needed a dramatic rent increase to cover actual costs. I even devised a cunning plan, taking advantage of government rent subsidies, that would effectively leave most of the members slightly better off after the rent increase.

But they weren't having any of it. The simple fact was that most of the members didn't want to pay higher rents and they were completely uninterested in actually managing the co-operative.

The annual financial deficits were too abstract a problem. They weren't too stupid to understand them, it was far worse. They were too obtuse to accept that it was their problem if the housing co-op that housed them went broke. The government housing department would have to take over then, some suggested. You could see they thought this might be an improvement, as it would relieve them of the burden of responsibility.

Many obstinately refused to accept that my proposed solution was viable. A couple of people suggested it would be fraud to raise our rents in such a way as to deliberately capture the maximum possible government rent subsidies available to families and pensioners, then spend some of the increased income paying housing related costs like utilities. But this was just an excuse really, the real issue was that they were never going to support a rent increase for any reason.

Not if their life depended on it.

Anyhow, a little later one of the founders of the co-op came back in. She was a lot better at dealing with people than me. She also didn't share the majority aversion to accepting responsible for management. Within a couple of months she had engineered a crisis that gave them little option but to accept my plan.

She pretty much took on the role of great leader from then on. In fact it wasn't long before everyone who questioned her even slightly was gone. Including me, from which you can assume she had a very low tolerance for threat. So basically everyone was happy.

But the moral is that you can't just assume that everyone wants to take responsibility. Most people haven't been brought up that way, they've been brought up to live in a world where they take orders and its always other people who give orders and take responsibility. Self management has to be learned. It can be learned, but in our present society it isn't natural by a long shot.

So as for the US auto workers successfully self-managing the American car industry, worker ownership isn't the only precondition. Tnext big hurdle is that they have to want to be responsible for management. I suspect that this might be a very alien concept.

Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas



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