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Currently I’m actually…
I’m living in a friend’s house that he owns.
He and another friend bought a house together
and all the rent gathered from that is going
actually to just repairing the house.
So yeah, but I did live in the
Kalamazoo Collective Housing for several years
and their entire goal is
affordable living in Kalamazoo.
It started up in 2006/2007
and it was a group of college students
here in Kalamazoo that wanted to have…
one of them had traveled around the country
and seen other co-op houses around the country
and was like, “Wow. This is really amazing.
And we have a huge lack of
affordable housing in Kalamazoo,
so let’s get together and make a co-op,”
where you basically own the house and all
the money collected from rent would then go
into repairing the house,
saving some of it for emergency money,
some of it goes towards maintenance,
you know, just it kind of covers everything.
It also covers… most co-op houses also cover
food and utilities on that.
So it’s kind of one sum that you pay and you have
food, all your utilities are covered.
It’s great.
A lot of the co-opers have gone on to be
homeowners, which is great because
the co-ops really teach you the idea of taking
care of your own house.
I would say that’s probably a significant
reason why out of the
what are we at now?
Like 40 some alumni of the organization
a solid 10 of them that I’m in
contact with own houses now.
I’m under the belief that the reason
they’re building these and working on them
and making them better places is because of
the time that they spent with the co-ops.
If you’re running on a low-income life…
I don’t think a lot of people realize that
that permeates into every aspect of your life,
to even just what foods you’re buying
to ways that you’re going to socialize
because our standard idea of going to the bar
or going to a coffee shop
just isn’t necessarily an option.
It’s also one of those things that
what affordable housing there is,
which is more of like just renting out sections
of houses in local neighborhoods,
they aren’t well maintained at all.
And most of which because they’re
old houses that have been converted to
three or four apartments in it,
are not accessible at all.
I think humans are really resilient.
So I think when people need affordable housing,
they find ways for that work.
Some of which isn’t always the most legal
of things, like living in spots that aren’t deemed
as a legal spot to live.
Some of it is also cramming as many people
into a really small space so that the rent
gets cheaper and cheaper with every
person added on.
So I think
I mean, there are of course plenty of cases
who simply can’t find housing
but I think a lot of people end up
finding something, but it’s just
not at all a good situation.