Rochdale Village Co-op Apartments, Berkeley

I met Oscar, the President of Rochdale Village Cooperative Apartments and a current resident, in the courtyard (pictured above).

History:

Rochdale Village was constructed in 1971 on the site of the McKinley Continuation School.¹ It was named after the English Town of Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. It was in this town that the Rochdale Pioneers decided on the Rochdale Principles of Cooperation. The principles were revised by the International Co-operative Alliance in 1966 and are still in use today.²

1. Open, voluntary membership.
2. Democratic governance.
3. Limited return on equity.
4. Surplus belongs to members.
5. Education of members and public in cooperative principles.
6. Cooperation between cooperatives.
7. Concern for community

The project was part of an effort to expand low-cost housing for UCB students. The Berkeley Student Cooperative nonprofit received a low-interest loan from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to carry out the project. Years earlier, Harry Kingman had led co-opers to lobby Congress to make student co-ops eligible for this kind of loan.³ Since the 1970s, solar panels and high-efficiency furnaces and water heaters were added.

Overview:

• 259 residents
• 96 units (studios and 2, 3, and 4 bedroom apartments)
• Rent/month: $719 for a studio, $626 per person in 2 bedroom, $539 per person in 3 bedroom, $482 per person in 4 bedroom
• Parking Spaces: 30 (all in use) and a bike shed
• Shared laundry, garden
• 2 entrances
• Favorite places for conversation: common room, group-reserve room, BSC events
• Challenges: noisy people on Telegraph on weekend nights, interlocking apartments with thin walls, lack of familiarity between residents, safety concerns

Neighborhood:

Rochdale is located in a flat area of the city, a short walk down Telegraph from UC Berkeley campus. The land is owned by the University and leased by the Berkeley Student Co-op non-profit. They renew the lease every ten years. Rochdale has a pretty good relationship with the University and the UCPD. The location is not without its challenges. On the weekend, pedestrians on their way between fraternity houses and bars are too loud for residents who are trying to sleep. The kids at the neighboring schools can also be loud during recess (Oscar was less concerned with this noise). Bikes and laptops were stolen when doors were left unlocked. Homeless people sometimes come into the courtyard and are asked to leave. If a fight breaks out, the UCPD are called.

Outdoor space:

Although Rochdale has quite a bit of outdoor space compared to other Berkeley Student Co-ops, Oscar perceived there to be very little outdoor space. The backyard is home to the “Butterfly garden” that grows less than 1% of the food consumed by the residents. Residents put in 8 hours of work shift toward the garden or other home improvement projects per semester. They used to play a bit of basketball on the court and soccer on the field but that slower down a bit recently. The interior courtyard has seen a few parties over the years, but is primarily a place where residents pass one another as they come and go. Some of the top floor apartments have double-loaded corridors that are open to the weather. These outdoor spaces occasionally host parties that are not well attended and usually get shut down.

Oscar mentioned three different zones where parties are hosted: “the heights”, “the flats”, and a few apartments in building E where some members of the student group “Hermanos Unidos” reside. “The flats” are at ground level and “the heights” are above ground level (the parking garage runs underneath building B). Building C, D, and E are commonly thought to be the noisier buildings.

Common Space:

The most active common spaces are the laundry room, the office, and the common room/pool table room. The common room is used for social events and for making important group decisions every-other-Monday during council meetings. The hot tub was out of order and Oscar told me the computer room was rarely utilized. During my visit, a few residents chatted in the laundry room while they waited on their clothes, residents popped in and out of the office to talk to the amicable staff person, and a study group met up in the common room. Unwanted items are placed in the “free pile” in the laundry room where people meet and fuel midnight-laundry-conversations with vending machine snacks.

Residences:

A variety of apartment configurations make up the 6 buildings. One of the primary arrangements is illustrated below:

The 4 bedroom apartments (yellow & white) interlock with one another so that the upstairs of one apartment is directly above the neighboring apartment. This diagrammatic section illustrates the arrangement:

Oscar lived in one of these interlocking apartments and disliked the design because he was kept awake by the noise of his neighbors moving about their daily tasks. The bedrooms of one apartment are above the living room of the neighboring apartment and vice-versa; there is basically no acoustic privacy between neighbors because the walls are very thin. His apartment was equipped with a stovetop, oven, refrigerator, and freezer. The refrigerators are replaced regularly and work well. Oscar would have liked another half-bath downstairs, a bit more space in general, and thicker walls. He suggested they take down the walls between the living areas so neighbors could get to know each other better.

The hallways are dimly lit and often smell strongly of whatever is being cooked in the apartments.

Shared amenities:

• Common room/game room (couches, pool table, foosball, air hockey)
• Office (considered part of the common space)
• Hot tub (not in service usually)
• Laundry room: 6 commercial washers, 6 commercial dryers
• Organic “Butterfly Garden”
• Computer room with printing (computers are old, rarely use and the printer rarely has toner)

Energy/waste:

During the 2010-2011 school year Rochdale used:

Electricity: ~30,000 and 40,000 kWh/month (winter) & slightly less over summer

Natural gas: ~3,900 therms/month (winter) & ~1,000 therms/month (summer)

Water: ~350 CCF/month (winter) & ~625 therms/month (summer)

Oscar estimated ~50% of apartments use the optional recycling/compost bins

Rochdale vs. Fenwick/student co-op houses:

Many students prefer the Rochdale apartments over the neighboring co-operative apartment, Fenwick. Although Fenwick is much newer, the apartments have larger common living areas, the hot tub is usually functioning and clean, it is more expensive.

Oscar told me what he liked about co-operative houses: eventually you run into housemates getting food or going to the bathroom, they are more cooperative, people hang out in the kitchen, and food is shared. He found the co-op apartments to be attractive because people tend to be more on their own, they are considered cleaner, there is no public association with drug use, there is a greater diversity in culture, and there is more time to “chill” alone. He compared the layout to a dorm.

When Oscar was the President of Rochdale, he knew around 20-30% of the residents by name. Most residents on the same floor are usually at least acquainted. Oscar mentioned that there used to be a central kitchen and he would like to see it come back or have at least a couple communal dinners each week. Without a central kitchen, it is easy to go long periods of time without seeing a friend and it takes a bit of effort to be an active member of the community.

Safety:

16 security cameras were installed as a reaction to a sexual assault incident. Occasionally, someone from the street comes into the courtyard and refuses to leave or causes a fight and the UCPD is called. Those looking for cans don’t cause any trouble and the Rochdale staff help them.

Conclusions:

For most residents, the Rochdale Village co-operative apartment functions like any other apartment complex. The key points of distinction are the laundry room, the office, and the common room where residents have the opportunity to get to know another. Some become involved in the biweekly meetings and social events, but the large majority come and go with a high level of anonymity, passing each other in the courtyard space as strangers. Many co-opers come to Rochdale to “retire” when they want more time on their own and the anonymity works for them.

Acoustic privacy is, in fact, the primary concern of residents. Those living in the interlocking apartments broadcast their every movement through the thin walls and into the ears of their neighbors. Oscar’s idea to take down the walls between the two living rooms of the apartments is interesting because it would give the residents more opportunity to communicate about when they need quiet to sleep or study.

“The flats” and “the heights” are valuable spaces for hosting parties. They are easy to find and open out to the backyard space. The low walls around the entrances provide subtle boundaries that serve as places to lean and converse when the weather is fair.

259 people is a very large co-op. In cohousing, the Danes never built a community for more than 50 adults⁴. Through trial and error, they discovered that 20-50 people is optimum. 259 people may be too many people for a single tight knit co-operative community. A single centralized kitchen and/or shared meals may not be an effective community building strategy for Rochdale. Perhaps several (5-13) larger kitchens throughout the complex would be a more effective design: providing the opportunity for residents to get to know one another a bit better and moving some of the noise out of the individual apartments where people sleep and study. Perhaps residents would be less worried about cooking aromas in the hallways if they could take part in the making and eating of a shared meal.

¹”Berkeley Student Cooperative.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundations, Inc.. 18 Jan 2012. Web. 30 Jan 2012.

²”Rochdale Principles.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundations, Inc.. 28 Jan 2012. Web. 30 Jan 2012.

³”History of the BSC.” Berkeley Student Cooperative. 30 Jan 2012.

⁴McCamant, Kathryn and Charles Durrett. Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities. New Society Publishers, 2011.

Domes saved! - read and watch all about it!

In 2011, the Davis Domes – a community of 28 students living in fourteen dome-shaped cottages amongst gardens and forests, faced one of the biggest challenges in their 40-year existence.

Threatened with closure, the Domies rallied together and with the help of thousands of volunteers and supporters, they gained the support of other cooperatives, changed the minds of administrators, raised money, and fixed up the Domes.
 Domes Storybook by Alfred

Domes Community Build video by Ashley Woodbury

Another type of shared housing: the houses of the reality TV show Big Brother

Though only a small percent of Americans live in co-ops and other shared housing, the idea of lots of unrelated people living together is actually quite well known, for it is the basic premise of reality television.  These differ from typical co-ops and intentional communities in such that residents are selected not by each other, but by the TV production company*.  Also, while co-ops generally aim for some degree of community longevity, reality show communities are intended to be temporary from the start, with lifespans of just a few months.  However, if we put aside economic and sociological differences aside and look purely from an architectural point of view, the locales of  reality TV have quite a bit in common with co-ops and ecovillages: big dining tables, hot tubs, large open common spaces, etc.

*There is a third way, the unintentional community method used at the Berkeley student co-ops, where residents are assigned mechanically, more on that later


The best known and longest running of these shows is MTV's The Real World, which will be the topic of a future post.  For today's post, the focus will be on Big Brother.  In this show, which started in 1999, a group of residents - typically 14 - live in a house for 2-3 months.  During this time they are confined to the house and have no contact with the outside world.  Like many a co-op, there is no TV.  Once a week, one resident is voted out of the house by either the audience, the residents, or a combination of the two.  When it's down to a handful of residents, a winner is chosen to win the grand prize, usually a few hundred thousand dollars.  Residents are taped at all times.

Big Brother houses

Type: Reality TV Show Set

Built in: 2000s 

Building type: One or two story stage set

Occupants: 10-19

Room mix: 1-4 bedrooms shared by all residents

Restrooms: Mix of shared and private, typically 1-3 bathrooms

Parking: N/A

The nature of this isolation requires special construction: Big Brother houses are actually a series of rooms inside a TV studio, as shown in the diagram below.  Backstage areas are where the camera crew works.  Though there is an open-air yard, it is open only to the sky and provides no visual access to neighbors.

Here are some floorplans from the US, British, and Pilipino versions of the show.

Looking at some floorplans, a few patterns can be seen:
- The common spaces tend to be big and open.  This facilitates interaction and also permits good camera angles
- The bedroom to common space ratio is slightly lower than that of co-op houses.  This is because instead of giving each person their own bedroom, or at most doubles, triples, and quads, in Big Brother, bedrooms are usually shared by 5 or more people.  In some cases, everyone shares a bedroom.  The upside is that very little circulation space is needed.  The downside is that outside of the bathroom residents have no privacy, but that is an intended design feature for the purpose of the show.
- The number of residents per bathroom is similar to that of student co-ops.  Both reality show houses and student co-ops benefit from residents having no fixed 9-5 schedule, thus avoiding bathroom rush hour.
- Starting with 14 residents means that for a typical 3-month season, one resident can be voted out each week to end up with a handful at the end.  It also means the house is somewhat overcrowded at the beginning of the season.

Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_8_%28U.S.%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_2005_%28UK%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_2006_%28UK%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_2008_%28UK%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinoy_Big_Brother:_Double_Up

Pacifico: If you build it, who will come?

Pacifico Co-op

Davis, California

In my co-op travels past I had heard many a story of Pacifico, often in the form of hushed tales of it being a failed co-op.  But one night on the road up to Davis, I also heard a deeper, more mixed story, about how Pacifico, in spite of – or perhaps, because of - its chronic vacancy issues and lack of community, became an unusually diverse co-op, with lots of youth from low-income backgrounds and Asian international students – two demographics often lacking in the other more successful co-ops I’ve known. 

And so, on a recent trip to Davis with a few other Berkeley co-op folks, I decided to see it for myself.  With directions from fellow co-opers at J Street Co-op, we biked in the cool summer evening air from J Street to Pacifico.  The roads and trails brought us along electrical substations, over the freeway and railroad tracks, and into suburban South Davis, a completely different world of six-lane roads, strip malls, and fancy garden apartments.  Gliding through the parking lots of one of these, we finally arrived at a row of darkened buildings at the edge of town.  The parking lot was mostly empty and the yard out front neat but completely dead.  Walking closer though the unmistakable signs of co-opness came into view: a large bike rack, a fire pit with chairs, a hammock, and a garden with four neatly tended raised beds. 

Wandering around a few minutes, we finally saw someone come out on the third floor balcony overlooking the courtyard.  It turned out to be one of the last original residents, getting some fresh air while having his last dinner at Pacifico – he would be moving out the very next day.  He invited us upstairs, and we climbed the deserted metal and concrete exterior stairs to the 3^rd floor doorway.  Inside, the building looked like an empty dorm, with white walls and institutional flooring, bulletin boards, and overhead fluorescent tube lighting.  Aside from our host and his partner, there was no one else around in the common space, partly because of the vacancies but mostly because it was summer and all the Davis students had gone home. 

The common space featured a sink and fridge, a TV, and a table with just four chairs – in retrospect, a tiny number given the floor’s capacity of 10 residents.  A bag of groceries sat on the table and three cases of Pacifico beer were on the counter in the corner.  We talked and rambled on for a good forty minutes about the changes coming to Pacifico before making our way back to the Domes, where we were spending the night. 

Pacifico Co-op facts:

Built in: 2000, 4^th building added in 2004

Construction cost: $4 million

Financing: 60% from bank loan at 7%, 25% from City of Davis loan at 6.5% & 3.5%, 15% from loans from other cooperatives at 8%. 

Building type: Four 3-story walkups built to be co-ops

Occupants: 112 (28 in each building)

Room mix: 82 singles (84-114 sf), 14 doubles (133-202 sf), 1 studio apartment

Parking: 70 spaces

This grand project grew from a meeting between Davis Campus Cooperatives and the Japanese Consumer Cooperatives in 1988.  DCC was a young co-op consisting of two small houses that had just opened that year.  From the meeting, DCC received a commitment from the JCC to loan $400,000, which it used to gain support and additional loan pledges from the City of Davis and other NASCO student co-ops towards the opening of more co-ops. 

In 1998, an opportunity came up when a new market rate apartment development needed to fulfill its city-mandated inclusionary housing requirement.  The project’s birth as an inclusionary housing project necessitated new construction and also determined the size and location of the project.  The developer provided the land, and the NASCO, other co-op, and City of Davis loans were used to leverage traditional financing from local bank First Northern Bank which covered the remaining 60% of the cost. 

Initially, three identical buildings were constructed to house 84 students.  To maximize efficiency, Pacifico used a double-loaded corridor plan with minimal common areas.  Small common areas were provided on the upper floors, with the main kitchens on the first floor.  A large community building was to be put off until later.  To honor its funders and Co-op values, the buildings were named Kyoto, Unity, and Rochdale, though in practice the address letters A, B, and C were more commonly used. 

Due to its large size – Pacifico had more rooms than all the existing Davis student co-ops combined – and distant location from the UC Davis campus and downtown, Pacifico was plagued with vacancies from the beginning.

Other Davis co-ops had the luxury of interviewing and selecting from a long list of prospective residents.  Pacifico needed to aggressively recruit international students to fill the rooms.  Language barriers, lack of interest in cooperative living, management by professional property management company rather than residents, and inadequate common spaces all contributed to a subdued sense of community. 

The building itself, though modern, earthquake-safe, and ADA accessible, had issues with water pressure and sound insulation.  The central air ducts provided a great way of funneling noise from bedroom to bedroom. 

Although vacancy rates remained high, a fourth identical building was constructed in 2004, with the idea that it would bring in more revenue.  Instead, Pacifico continued to struggle along.  The planned community building never materialized.  In 2006 NASCO stepped in and set up co-op style member management, however, vacancy issues persisted and worsened with the 2008 housing bust.  This led to the 2009 mortgage default and subsequent bailout by the City of Davis, which purchased the property for $1.6 million to preserve it as affordable housing. 

The California Center for Cooperative Development also made an attempt at a turnaround.  However, by 2010 the vacancy rate had exceeded 70%, and the buildings felt empty even with the remaining residents consolidated in buildings C and D.  Management was turned over to the county housing authority, Yolo County Housing.  YCH began to fill the vacant rooms with youth aging out of the foster care program. 

At the time I visited, Pacifico had a mix of international students, former foster youth, and a diminishing group of what one might call traditional co-opers.  The member I met was one of the latter, and he reminisced on the mutual learning between the groups in the last two years, but lamented that the shrinking number of people dedicated to the cooperative movement threatened the long-term prospects of the community as a co-op.  Plans had been drawn up for converting all but one of the buildings into apartments, though no work had happened yet, perhaps due to the estimated renovation price tag of $2 million.

Riding down the greenbelt path back to downtown, we passed a few other cyclists amongst the silent trees, apartments, and office parks of South Davis.  One might describe the whole evening as hypnotically peaceful, perhaps pacific…

Lessons from Pacifico

As a student co-op, Pacifico suffered from a distant location and its large size.  Whereas the Berkeley co-ops and the Austin co-ops have successfully developed and filled even larger buildings, 112 spaces far exceeded the demand at Davis and the community-building capabilities of DCC and NASCO.  Furthermore, the lack of a common space large enough for all the residents, even at reduced occupancy, hampered community formation.  Fortunately, the decision to build multiple buildings instead of one large one allowed a graceful partial shutdown of the project, with two buildings offline and two occupied.
 

Looking at Pacifico as an affordable housing project, co-op architecture could have provided a lower cost than traditional apartments.  Pacifico costed only $36,000 per resident to build, though if the actual occupancy rate is used, this number climbs to $50-70,000.  In retrospect, perhaps some of the buildings could have been built as apartments from the beginning.
 

Finally, viewing it as a social experiment, Pacifico created a rare community of folks from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds.  As far as cooperativity, at the end of the day, it was still by far the most cooperative place in all of suburban South Davis and certainly more communal than an ordinary apartment complex would have been. 

References:

City of Davis Staff Report - Pacifico Cooperative Memorandum of Understanding (August 2006). Includes financing and project history.

http://www.city.davis.ca.us/meetings/councilpackets/20060801/03D_Pacifico_Cooperative.pdf

City of Davis Staff Report – Pacifico Property Management and Redevelopment (June 2011. Includes new management plan by Yolo County Housing and pictures of maintenance work and cleaning.

http://cityofdavis.org/meetings/councilpackets/20110621/10-CC%20&%2006-RDA%20Pacifico%20Property%20Management%20&%20Predevelopment.pdf

Pacifico Co-op website: www.pacifico.coop

Davis Wiki: http://daviswiki.org/pacifico_student_cooperative_housing

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Campus_Cooperatives

“Pacifico Reconstruction Remains Uncertain” California Aggie (February 2011): http://theaggie.org/article/2011/02/07/pacifico-reconstruction-remains-uncertain