I keep going aww - oh wait they are not talking about me but another Gar. With my name, "Gar" referring to someone other than me is an unusual experience. I will say that a lot of organizations that are nominally coops are not. ESOPs, mutual insurance companies and patient owned HMOs like Group Health where really management maintains practical control.
>
> [WS:] Absolutely. But it may well be that we are like blind men
> touching different parts of an elephant and telling what the animal
> looks like.
>
> I was for some time involved in housing cooperatives, and my
> experience was that this was a hard sell to most people outside
> certain ethnic groups (mainly Blacks and Eastern European Jews.) More
> to the point, the coop that I was a part of was created as an
> anti-dote to problems with public housing and it was very successful
> comparing to many failed attempts of "urban renewal" - at least in
> Baltimore. I was surprised that the example was not emulated. I
> understand that many of these "urban renewal" projects were driven by
> developers trying to make a buck, but that hardly explains why coops
> were not emulated. From a construction point of view, housing is
> housing, regardless how it is owned, so developers would make their
> money anyway. The coop that I was a part of consisted or row houses
> rehabilitated by developers - no different than privately owned rehab
> homes in Baltimore. It is also my understanding that DC coops face a
> similar problem despite much higher housing prices which, one would
> think, would make housing coops more attractive.
>
> However, it would be nice to have some more systematic study about the
> prospects of and obstacles to housing and other forms of cooperatives
> in the Etats Unis. Or maybe they exist, but I a not aware of them.
>
> Wojtek
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