Introduction
In the past year, I was living in one of 3 houses co-op community called PEACH, located in 166 Watermyn St. The house I lived is formerly known as BACH (Brown Association for Cooperative Housing), founded in 1970 by Mr. Steve Cowell etc.
It’s a house with such a character contributed by years and years students from RISD, Brown… even someone just graduated from Harvard and MIT who get a job in Providence seeking for a temporary shelter, because of rent fee including utility is only $590 per month. We have a large bright kitchen with tons of shared seasoning from different culture carried by ppl from all over the world, a huge basement with painting room, music room and workshop (we even have chop saw, hand saw, metal welder and tons of free material), a front yard with flowers I can name but growing wildly, a bonfire that I spent a lot of leisure time there talking with ppl from nowhere… Also, we get best members living here, Kobe from RISD GAC program who spent 5 years living here built up a Chicken coop in the yard, Alane a 60ish year-old funny lady who graduated from RISD almost 40 years ago, new member Calum with her 8-year-old daughter “O” … There are a lot of stories I can tell but the endless memory flow should stop here.
About 8 years ago a NGO group NASCO bought all properties and becoming the manager of the community that charges 92% of all incomes from rents to cover all those necessity fees… or as the bylaw said, we are actually run the community. That’s why I took one of “manager” job last Oct, as treasury, who takes care all financial problem of this house to contribute my ability to the community and have chance to contact with NASCO dealing with routine issue. That’s why I become firs hand participant as a manager in a such dramatic chaos happened since last year – NASCO decide to sell all three properties (about 400 million they can get) and discontinue PEACH this September to making up deficits we made (as they said). We tried to improve our current system and make up the money we owe to them because of the pandemic, but every time we communicated with NASCO, they blamed us for not doing a good enough job and didn't give us any advice on how to improve it. There are a lot of specifics, but this is all I can say for the sake of space.
The Dilemma of Social Justices
I understand that running a "communist" community is difficult, and I'm not a fan of that kind of socialism, because the social division of labor is already established, you always need to exchange money or material with other professional people or organizations via a medium(money). The self-sufficient communal estate of Owen 2 centuries ago is obviously not suitable for this kind of city social life. As Lenin shamelessly said, capitalism was originally built up by overseas colonization and plunder, so we communists had to do the same for the cause of the revolution - the exploitation of human beings (peasants), then everybody can share the fortune we together made… But my parents and I knew what that kind of communism was, as I mentioned to other members at a house meeting, we need positive incentives for those who contribute to the community, and we might know those who have the power to decide on the distribution tend to reap more profits like NASCO did.
Apart from this path, another kind of exploitation is obviously the seizure of land or should say turning land into capital. Everyone extracts resources from this land, yes, even if the co-op doesn't want to, but the IRS, the energy companies, the city manager (yes, we were fined because of Chicken coop used to located in the yard) etc. they will continue bothering you… It's a good bet that the future buyer of this house will knock it down and rebuild the place. Just as I see every day the neighborhoods around Brown are tearing down those old buildings and putting up new multi-story apartments, and just as I've heard - the Covid has changed the way people live, and they no longer want to share their lives with so many people in same house… So, I tried to bury a one feet sized "headstone" in the front yard near the street. It wasn't buried deep enough to be seen by someone pass by, or to be seen by the construction workers soon... All I want is for all this history to be recorded in one way or another.
I deeply love the house. but I had to bury a grey memory past in this season filled with green. It might be nothing, like tears in the rain.