A co-op, generally speaking, is a place, organization, business, or group of people who contribute collectively to running their affairs. The idea behind the cooperative housing approach is to trade the landlord-tenant style approach to housing for one that allows all members to make house decisions autonomously. Members of the Ann Arbor housing co-ops are all owners of their houses during their time spent there. Everyone pays a monthly ‘rent’, which is not actually a rent but a payment that covers room, board, and utilities (usually including laundry, internet, and sometimes cable) for the month. They all contribute four to six hours of work per week to make the house run smoothly (cooking, cleaning, ordering food, sitting on ICC committees). They have house meetings every few weeks, and although someone does serve as a president, all of our decisions are made consensually.

It seems to me that it is within our own nature as humans to function cooperatively, with an emphasis on community wellbeing. And while many organizations do exist for this purpose, I’ve found that the notion of cooperation is largely met in the US with skepticism or remarks about ‘hippie’ culture. Largely because of our country’s continuous, blooming suburbanization, based on individuality, consumption, and the nuclear family, we have ignored other alternative ways of living and organizing ourselves and our livelihoods. Beginning in the 1930’s, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) assisted homeowners in securing their own single-family homes in suburban neighborhoods by subsidizing the costs. According to urban historian Kenneth Jackson, the FHA and VA induced “lenders who have money to invest it in residential mortgages by insuring them against loss on such instruments, with the full weight of the United States Treasury behind the contract.” Our unflinching acceptance of this kind of individuality in housing has continued into the twenty-first century, and is further compounded by a profit-driven mentality as well. It’s our notion of competition, to make more money, get a bigger house, that distances us as Americans from ideals of cooperation under which human beings function so naturally.

I currently live at Vail House, a vegetarian student-housing co-op in Ann Arbor. Before I knew much about the cooperative movement and the culture that accompanies it, the word “co-op” triggered images in my mind of quaint, Victorian-style houses with couches and hammocks on the porches and bikes strewn across the lawns. These are housing co-ops, the kind many of us Michigan students are familiar with. But after visiting Montreal during Spring Break and experiencing the huge scope of definitions that the word “co-op” conveys, I have a much broader image in my mind.

Over spring break, I led a trip to Montreal for members of the Ann Arbor Intercooperative Council (ICC). We piled into a twelve-person van on Saturday morning, excited to drive 10-plus hours in order to get a taste of the Canadian cooperative culture. Once there, we traipsed through the foot-high Montreal snow to the many co-ops that the city had to offer. I was impressed by the extent, variety, accessibility, and elements of sustainability and social justice work that these co-ops embodied. We visited brewpub co-ops, dining co-ops, co-op bookstores, as well as venues and clubs that functioned cooperatively. Co-ops were everywhere – and the ubiquitous acceptance of cooperation was astounding.

While in Montreal, we slept on the second floor of a co-op called the Montreal Urban Community Sustainment (MUCS) project, located in the Notre-Dame de Grace region of Montreal. MUCS is a vegetarian dining co-op that grew out of a project at McGill University. It has the ultimate goal of becoming a full-fledged dining and housing co-op with affordable housing and a focus on sustainability. Right now, the dining co-op operates every day and cooks hot vegetarian dinners for community members, including homeless people. MUCS gets most of its ingredients from a food bank that collects donations from larger grocery stores and food services that either have extra food or products that will expire soon. Anyone is welcome to eat at MUCS, and a small donation is suggested (or otherwise, help with food preparation and clean up). MUCS has many other initiatives, including a Free School, which operates with the idea that anyone can teach and anyone can learn. While there, I also learned about how the MUCS building itself was constructed sustainably. For example, the building has straw-bale insulation in its walls: a feature which is not only easily maintainable, but provides effective insulation and a place for otherwise discarded straw to be used productively.

In addition to MUCS, we looked at Coop La Maison Verte (The Green House). La Maison Verte is essentially a consumer co-op and café that sells fairly traded and environmentally friendly goods, from coffee to zines to detergents and soaps. While there, we learned about its functioning and how it’s a bit different from the housing co-ops we are so familiar with. La Maison Verte is a “co-op de solidarite”, or a solidarity co-op. This means that three different sectors have a share in its decision-making process: workers, members, and ‘support’. The idea is to give fair representation to everyone who has a stake in the operations of the co-op. So, workers whose salaries come from the co-op have a say in its functioning, as do the co-op’s members. Members are people who patronize the store and who support the ideology of La Maison Verte. ‘Support’ refers to a group of members who pay a larger membership fee than regular members, and who therefore are considered their own entity. La Maison Verte has an elected board of nine representatives that consists of three people from each of these categories.

While La Maison Verte serves as an example of functional solidarity, the co-op Milton Parc serves as a counterweight to the notion that cooperative housing is only for college students. Most people are not even aware that this kind of arrangement exists for families and adults as well. Not only students can live in a house with many people who make their decisions collectively and autonomously; adults and families with children can also participate in this kind of larger living arrangement in which everyone’s views are valued in the decision-making process and functioning of the house. Co-op Milton-Parc in Montreal serves as proof. Milton-Parc consists of several city blocks of affordable, cooperative housing, some of which is subsidized by the organization itself. Each unit (or physical house) functions autonomously, yet is part of the larger Milton-Parc umbrella organization. While the houses of Milton-Parc do not discriminate (they do house a number of McGill students), they are largely intended for adults and families, as well as low-income members who are eligible for subsidized housing.

One of my favorite visits was Concordia University’s People’s Potato – a cooperatively run dining service in the student union that offers donation-based hot vegan meals every Wednesday night. People’s Potato welcomes students and non-students alike, although it operates from inside the Concordia student union. I was impressed at this kind of community outreach that Concordia allows within its private buildings. I would like to someday see the University of Michigan welcome a community kitchen into the doors of our own union.

I was more than impressed at the number and wide variety of co-ops in Montreal and Quebec in general. I was fascinated to see how MUCS incorporates so many elements of sustainability while working to empower the community, and how Milton-Parc both brings together people interested in the cooperative movement and creates an options for lower-income housing in Montreal. Cooperative culture is both enjoyable and valuable in supporting communities and working toward greater sustainability and social justice. Living with others who share similar values and working toward collective goals can also feel empowering and fulfilling in a way that individual effort and success usually does not. I hope that someday the United States will wholeheartedly embrace this ideology as a practical alternative to the profit-driven mindset that pervades our nation.