With a Little Help from Our Friends: Creating Community as We Grow Older

5. Cooperatives: Living Affordably

56 Chapter 5 Cooperatives Living Affordably In the high desert of central Oregon on a crisp October morning, Dick Martin led me on a tour of the Green Pastures Senior Community where he lives. Green Pastures, a housing cooperative of mobile homes, sits on the edge of redmond, a thriving town of twenty-seven thousand people. The high desert is on an immense plateau that stretches eastward from the foothills of the Cascades range. Surrounding the town are acres of fields, dried golden in the arid climate, the only swatches of green from acreage still being irrigated before winter sets in. Green Pastures appears as serene as its name suggests. The community, comprised of fifty-one lots—forty-nine of them with homes—laid out in three adjacent sections, is tidy, with bursts of pink and gold from marigolds, petunias, and chrysanthemums planted near doorsteps. Manufactured homes have come a long way from their roots in trailer parks. The housing type—the preferred name now is mobile or manufactured—is ideal for people with disabilities or who have age-related mobility problems. The homes are a pleasant combination of feeling both roomy and compact, with all the amenities of a traditional (also known as stick-built) ranch-style house. I’ve come to Green Pastures to get a feel for what life is like in a homeowner cooperative for people fifty-five and over. Dick Martin led the effort to organize the co-op, and he combines the roles of de facto mayor, maintenance supervisor, cheerleader, and helpful neighbor. he’s a tall, confident Westerner, can-do but not blustery. ramona, his wife of fifty-seven years, is soft-spoken and sweet, and seems equally committed to the cooperative venture. as we walked through the park, Dick related something of each co-op member’s story—the couple in their eighties who are both itinerant preachers ; the country music legend; the woman whose pioneering grandfather laid out the streets of nearby Bend; the family who chose to buy two homes in the park, for two generations to live side by side. Susan, out sweeping her porch on this chilly morning, stops to chat. “I love it here,” she said. “It’s quiet, peaceful. It’s the calmest place I’ve ever been. My neighbors are nice.” Bob Gibson, a wise-cracking country and western guitar player and song- Cooperatives 57 writer who performed in the old days with Willie, Merle, and Johnny, said he likes it here fine. “We’re just a bunch of old guys hanging on by our fingernails ,” he jokes of his neighbors. “You reach that point in life where you don’t want all those burdens, where you don’t want all those chores.” (he also offers such sage words as, “Don’t hang around the senior center. You’ll get depressed .” and “You can tell where the seniors are—where all the Buicks are parked.”) he and his wife, Carol, also a performer, clear out for Yuma, arizona, half the year, to get away from the snow, but otherwise plan to stay at Green Pastures . “If you’re a senior you cannot find a better deal and a better place to live than a co-op like this,” he said. “If you can help your neighbor a little bit or they can help you, what’s wrong with that?” across the country and a world away, in a canyon of high-rise apartments in Manhattan, similar sentiments are echoed by members of Penn South, an intergenerational housing cooperative of five thousand members living in three thousand apartments in ten huge brick buildings in the Chelsea neighborhood . Stretched across the fence along a parking lot, an immense banner celebrated the co-op’s fiftieth anniversary in 2012. The Penn South members I met said that their cooperative is fundamentally different from a condominium or rental apartments. “a cooperative is affordable and nonprofit and self-governing,” as harriet, a long-time member, explained it. “There should be a lot more places like this.” at first glance, Green Pastures and Penn South seem to have little in common . One is age restricted, the other not. One is rural, the other urban. One is comprised of mobile homes, the other apartments. But they are variations on the cooperative themes of member-owned and democratically run, with a strong sense of community as the foundation. Both are officially considered affordable housing by their respective jurisdictions and qualify for subsidized grants...