Utopia Gains Fair Haven Foothold

A neighbor came over and mowed the lawn for three guys who recently moved to a house on Atwater Street. In return, they made him a lunch of tofu and roasted vegetables.

It was an example of basic old-fashioned neighborliness — as well as the beginnings of a new ​“intentional community,” one in which people work for each other, not for money.

The three roommates — Adam King, Adam Wascholl, and Bill Richo — are founding members of an initiative they’re calling the Atwater Resource Cooperative (ARC). They see it as a new way for neighbors on Atwater to live and work together by sharing their time and skills for mutual benefit.

ARC has three houses so far, another coming soon, more on the way. Houses, and dreams of a different way for neighbors to live together.

They have plans for an alternative local economy based on ​“gifts” of labor and expertise rather than on money, and for an alternative to local property ownership. The group would collectively own community members’ houses.

To that end, King and Wascholl recently assumed coordinator-ship of SHARE Haven, an alternative, time-based currency for Greater New Haven.

And King recently put down the down payment to buy two multi-family homes on Atwater Street, numbers 48 and 92, between Grand Avenue and Pine Street. He said he won’t own them for long. As soon as the group can figure out the appropriate legal mechanism, the properties will become ​“self-owning” LLCs, he said.

King said friends will soon move into two other houses close by on Atwater Street, expanding the number of ARC houses to four. Eventually the members of ARC will help each other by contributing what they are good at and enjoy doing amid a web of mutual aid and outside of the money economy. They would use the word ​“utopian” if not for that word’s connotations of naivete and impracticality, King said.

ARC’s plans are similar to some new and existing ventures in New Haven and elsewhere. Like King and his roommates, the founders of the recently opened New Haven Free Store are trying to create alternative economies based on gift giving. The Grove co-working space on Orange Street places a similar emphasis on cooperation and synergy. The Rochdale Co-op, a building on Elm Street near Howe, has been owned collectively by its various occupants since the 1940s.

Across the country, co-housing community members live in intentionally designed neighborhoods, sharing facilities and activities like child care and cooking. And alternative currencies exist nationwide.

But while co-housing and alternative currencies are well-established elsewhere, ARC is, for now, three roommates in an apartment on Atwater Street — with big ideas.

Seeds

Last Thursday afternoon, King, Waschall, Richo, and a curled-up house cat occupied the darkened living room of their second-floor apartment. King, who’s 45, furnished glasses of water. He put coasters between them and the coffee table, at the request of Waschall, who’s 28 and who recently quit his job as an accountant after finding it ​“physically, emotionally, and spiritually” exhausting. Waschal, who wore a polo shirt and khaki shorts, stowed a meditation bench before taking a seat on the plush sectional sofa. Richo, a Yale librarian who’s also 28, sat on another couch, wearing a shirt with a Punisher skull on it and sporting a subtle mohawk.

“The idea is really simple,” began King, a professor of computer science at Fairfield Univerity. ​“We’re all interested in the way currency functions and the way money hurts us.” Under the current financial system people go out to do things they don’t want to do to accumulate dollars they then come home and give away to a landlord who often doesn’t live near them. Instead, King said, why not work for and with your neighbors on things you all want to accomplish?

The trio’s current efforts are the result of their meeting at an ​“Open Space,” a gathering of people interested in the ​“Transition” movement, which aims to find solutions to global energy, environmental, and economic crises. The three were among a group that began talking about local forms of currency and other alternative economic systems.

Over months of meetings last year, they formed a plan for a Local Exchange Trading System they call SeedLETS, which could form the operating system for their local gift-based economy. It’s a system of trade that, with the help of the internet, would allow people to share their services, skills, and needs directly with the people in their communities who need or can provide help.

SeedLETS could also take into consideration the personal values of both the consumer and the provider of a good or service, King said. For instance, if someone needs a housecleaner, she could log on to the website and sort people who are offering that service according to their commitment to, say, alternative transportation to her house, use of biodegradable cleaning agents, or proximity. The housecleaner and the house owner could then work out a trade of some kind, based on the needs of the housecleaner and the skills of the houseowner.

Eventually, an ecology of service exchanges will develop, thanks to the system’s sharing of information, King said. If someone is taking more than he is giving back to the community, people will stop providing him with services. The system based on information, not money, Waschall said.

King acknowledged that none of the three of them have the web skills to put together a SeedLETS website. ​“We don’t know how to do all this stuff. We’re not worried about it.”

In June, Waschall and King took over coordination of SHARE Haven, the local time bank organization, which they see as eventually evolving into SeedLETS, they said.

Eventually last year, after sufficient discussion ideas like SeedLETS, King decided it was time to put their money where their mouth was, so to speak. Richo recalled him saying, ​“Let’s just do it.”

He spotted a yellow house at 45 Atwater St. with a lot of land for gardening out back. He couldn’t buy it because of a messy legal situation with an absentee landlord, but he’s still hoping to pick it up in a foreclosure sale, King said.

Instead, in March, he closed on 58 Atwater St., a duplex. In May, he put down the down payment 92 Atwater St., which has three apartments. While both houses are currently owned in King’s name, he said he anticipates them soon moving into collective ownership.

Both buildings came with one apartment occupied each. Paul Hammer, a local activist and bicycle-rickshaw entrepreneur, joined ARC by moving into one of the open apartments at 92 Atwater.

King said two pairs of other friends are moving to Atwater Street to join the movement. Two recently bought a house across the street at number 47, and two more are looking to buy a house further up the street, he said.

Eventually, ARC may even have a communal house with shared space for community meals and meetings and a workspace for entrepreneurs to make things like jams and lip balms, King said.

Claudia Ruffle, who’s 61, bought 47 Atwater St. on June 20 with her boyfriend Vladimir Jankovic, and electronics technician and photographer. She said she had a longstanding interest in co-housing, but grew frustrated with the endless planning of a co-housing group she belonged to. When they saw that King was taking action on Atwater, she and Jankovic jumped on it, she said.

“We’re interested in having our lifestyles depend on local resources as much as possible and having our neighbors be an integral part of our daily life,” said Ruffle, who hasn’t worked for 10 years due to physical disabilities. She said she inherited money in 2007 that she now used to buy 47 Atwater. It’s her first time being a homeowner, she said.

A New ​“Tribe”?

King and roommates Wascholl and Richo are starting very small in developing a sharing system. They’ve begun contributing to the apartment according to their skills and preferences. Waschall, for instance, likes to build. He recently erected a new compost bin system in the backyard next to a new henhouse with six pullets. He’ll then benefit, in exchange, from the vegetables Richo is growing out there in buckets.

These small exchanges could be grown into larger cooperation at the neighborhood level, King said. For example, Richo and others could grow vegetables for several households and receive honey in exchange from a hypothetical Atwater Street bee-keeper. The three said they see it as a way to create a strong local community, one that’s free of the alienating forces of the traditional money economy.

The roommates have also begun trying out cooperative information-sharing systems among themselves, from color-coded labeling of food in the fridge to a joint Google calendar of important dates, like when the city is sweeping the street, Waschell said. It’s basic good-roommate stuff. It could also develop into ​“synergies” of mutual aid at a neighborhood level, King said.

Like sharing grocery-shopping duties. An alien looking down at the way people live would think we were crazy, Waschall said, borrowing a metaphor from King. It see a dozen cars going to the supermarket from a single neighborhood, each with a human buying groceries for a single household. Why not cooperate and send one car from Atwater Street to the supermarket, to pick up groceries for the whole community? Waschall asked.

Using the internet, a community could even create an interactive map showing errands that different households need to run, like picking up dry-cleaning. Waschall said. As with the the grocery shopping, one person could pick up clothes for several people. With that kind of mutual aid, people would have more time to do the things they really care about, he said.

King said he sees the goal as a return to the ​“original collective intelligence” and a time when families lived in ​“tribes.” ​“It’s reforming a localized group,” he said.

While the ideas may seem high-flown, it comes down to what works, Richo said. ​“Ultimately this was a practical decision to come together and live intentionally.” Living together and sharing resources is the ​“obvious solution,” he said.

Richo said neighbors have welcomed them into Atwater Street, which he said has suffered from the neglect of absentee landlords.

King said they’ve found the neighborhood quite affordable. The monthly mortgage bill is only $1,200 for 58 Atwater, and $1,300 for number 92, he said.

“To be honest, we’re really excited about the neighborhood and community here,” King said. People on Atwater Street have more practical skills than the professors and students who occupy his former neighborhood in East Rock, he said. If the money economy were to collapse, ​“these people would be better off,” Waschall said.

As ARC develops, members will look to forge more intentional connections with their new neighbors, and maybe get them on board with the vision. King said he’s already encountered one barrier to that effort. The downstairs tenants that came with his new house speak only Spanish, which will make it hard to explain notions of community synergy and the theory of a gift-based economy. He said he’s working on learning the language.