Opinion: Untangling the co-op snarl


“The people’s representatives will reach their destination, invested with the highest confidence and unlimited power. They will show great character. They must consider that great responsibility follows inseparably from great power. To their energy, to their courage, and above all to their prudence, they shall owe their success and their glory.” — Translated from decrees of the French National Convention, May 8, 1793.

By now, most council members must have figured out that their notion that the whole council could design co-op legislation from scratch just using public hearings but without adequate problem definition, alternatives analysis, or data collection, was ill conceived. Prudence, as the French advise, would direct the council to own up to the mistake and take a different tack, as I suggest below. I believe it would produce a more satisfactory result in less time, even starting at this late date.
Here are some parts:
The council needs to consider other alternative living arrangements besides co-ops. For example, two single mothers with two or three kids each, four or five unrelated senior citizens, or a group of disabled people with a caretaker could live in a single family house with arguably more societal benefit and less disruption than eight or 10 or 15 millennials. But none of these have been considered in the current ordinance.
The council is still trying to solve neighborhood conflicts with more and more rules as to how many people, cars, meetings, bank accounts, etc. a co-op must have. The presumption seems to be that sufficiently intrusive rules will force people to behave in a certain way. But, of course, rules alone don’t make people behave. And real enforcement would require that the city spend more money, hire more staff and actually prosecute violators. However, the council’s lack of substantive action to date has convinced people that the current weak level of enforcement will continue.
The council has also failed to deal with the market effects of their approach. I’ve already seen a Craigslist ad for forming a co-op. Apparently the potential to easily turn an over-occupied rental into a “co-op” is obvious, showing the futility of attempting to define “legitimate” co-ops. And all these ersatz co-ops will create a “sellers market,” allowing landlords to escalate rents, significantly reducing the affordability benefit of co-ops. On the other side, single family homeowners’ property values will be damaged by the impacts from the expected change in the quality of neighborhood life. And, even after a year on this issue, the council has yet to require new residential development to include units specifically designed for co-ops.
The council should make a fresh start.
First, the council should take the “responsibility” that comes along with the “power” and acknowledge that residents who bought homes in single-family neighborhoods have a reasonable expectation that their lifestyle will not be significantly disrupted by changes in the zoning rules. Second, the council should include consideration of the other alternative living arrangements that might work better for single-family neighborhoods. These people’s needs also deserve to be recognized. Third, the council should institute only those rules that they seriously intend to enforce, including distances for separation of co-op units, limits on numbers of cars and occupants, etc., and give up on the unenforceable rules that try to control internal behavior.
Finally, as the “people’s representatives,” council members who are pushing the co-op agenda should start treating the current residents of single-family neighborhoods as equally adult and open-minded as those few who happen to be sitting behind the city council dais. So the council should give neighbors the power to decide if a co-op can stay. For example, the properties within a 100-foot radius of a co-op property would vote every year on whether the co-op should stay, and if two properties say “no,” then the co-op is gone. This would give the city a real incentive to enforce its laws so as to help ensure the co-ops’ survival and give the co-op residents an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to pay attention to their neighbors’ concerns.
It is my contention that by not trying to jam co-ops down the throats of the single-family residents and giving them the power to say “yes” or “no,” these residents will be much more open to co-ops, and that the current resistance — created by the rather overbearing attitude of some council members that “we know better than you” — will dissipate. And it will also allay fears that this is all really a stalking horse for opening up single family neighborhoods to massive redevelopment.


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