La Luna Housing Co-operative Inc

Always restless these days, reading has particularly become quite a chore, should go out and do it in public, locked away here is no good. Did attend quite a useful La Luna meeting, the La Luna Housing Co-operative, of which I’m treasurer, is from time to time a fillip to my spirits because my expertise is recognised, my overall grasp of housing issues as they pertain to the co-op, the interface between government, our subsidisers, and co-op management, the interest of government to get those who can afford it, or might be able to afford it, out of community housing and into the private rental market versus the interest of co-ops to keep people on board who are motivated in the direction of community housing, who are reliable and efficient, and to resist government pushing us into a ‘welfare’ ghetto of low-income people with barely acceptable (and certainly never cutting edge) housing. Having said that, we’ve managed, or will have managed by the end of this year, to acquire six brand new homes (called new-builds) since September 2000, just over four years. These new houses were none of them graced by the presence of an architect, unlike the homes of my mate John S of MERZ Co-op (an artists’ co-op, if only in name) and of my quondam daughter-in-law Catherine of Halifax Eco-City Co-op. Basically, SACHA (the South Australian Community Housing Authority), our funding authority, has discouraged if not scrapped the use of architects in recent years, both for financial reasons and for reasons of control. Architects had a habit of subverting the Authority’s authority, cutting corners, ignoring budgets, pushing the envelope, innovating. There were accusations of middle-class wankerdom replacing lower-class gratitude. So now the genie has been put firmly back in the bottle, and we take what we can get with bowed heads. Our new-builds are design-and-construct affairs, but not bad for all that, a slight improvement on the old housing trust models, with some care, albeit inconsistent, taken over issues such as disability and conservation, in respect of the width of hallways, the placement and type of door-handles, the placement of windows. Currently we’re looking at budgeting for car-ports for those properties needing them (only three out of fourteen current properties – sixteen by the end of the year), as well as pergolas for shade and so forth. One of the dilemmas for our houses is that if we do grand improvements, our property values go up, pushing the ceiling rent for our tenants up. This isn’t a problem for those on low incomes, more or less permanently, such as myself, but it is for those who might even temporarily earn a high wage. Property values are sky-rocketing as it is, even without our improvements, and some of our members are feeling the pinch. Four options, they could quit their jobs, or move into cheaper, poorer co-op houses (not always available in any case), or quit the co-op, or put up with high rents. So, that’s a brief intro to co-op life and issues.