Check out pics from Houston's first co-operative living experiment in our slideshow.
photo by Mandy Oaklander
Before he had a balcony and a house full of friends, Jay Blazek Crossley lived alone in an apartment for five years. Fearing he'd turn into a creepy, isolated dude, Crossley brought the concept of co-ops to Houston.
photo by Mandy Oaklander
Members of the house often kick back after a long day at work on the shared deck, which overlooks the gentrifying neighborhood.
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Shrapnel from the city of Houston makes up the kitchen of a weird old house in the Third Ward. Wall tiles come from a torn-down property, and the countertops are thick oak doors that once swung at the Houston Ballet. Jay Blazek Crossley is dicing a small mountain of onions on the doors, helping prepare the nightly vegetarian dinner that feeds him and his ten housemates.
Not that any of them are vegetarians. It's just that it's part of their lease agreement that any food bought with pooled money be vegetarian.
That same lease agreement also is the impetus for the worms out back that feed on the chest-high heap of compost, and the rainwater tank that powers the house's four toilets. The landlord requires each tenant to sign a pledge promising to reduce his or her carbon footprint while living in this house.
This is Houston's first housing co-op: a community under one roof where members share resources and labor for the good of the environment, their social lives and their bank accounts. They cook and clean for each other. They fight with each other. At the end of the day, they come home to each other — and try not to sleep together.
Co-ops took hold in most major urban areas in the '60s and '70s as a way for free-spirited college students to live cheaply. They're still thriving across the country in progressive hubs. Austin alone has 20 co-ops. But Houston somehow escaped the co-op craze entirely. Despite several attempts, co-ops never caught on here. Now, a collection of pioneering young professionals — not time-warped hippies of the past — are setting out to prove that intentional communities like co-ops will work in Houston. Under founder Jay Crossley's lead, they aim to build five green co-ops in Houston's urban core within the next five years. They're planning to expand the model to families, as the next house is designed for parents and their children. After that, the group wants to start a giant college co-op in the Third Ward that will mix students from Texas Southern University, the University of Houston and Rice University.
While Crossley thinks the co-op model would be a great way for the Third Ward to become a cultural mix, several from the area are skeptical. State Representative Garnet Coleman, who actively fights gentrification in the ward his family has called home for generations, doesn't get why ten successful, predominantly white individuals would want to share a house anyway. "Ten in one house is a lot," he said. "What is the purpose of doing this? What do they call this stuff — new urbanism? Is that what this is supposed to be?" Crossley's priority is to provide affordable housing for all Houstonians, but particularly for people who already live in the Third Ward — a goal he's not sure the rest of the house shares, and one he fears will be glossed over when he moves back to Austin at the end of the year.
Although Coleman applauds the environmentalism of the project, he can't see it catching on with African-American professionals, who want privacy and a yard, he says. "If I'ma buy a house, that's the reason I buy it: because I want my privacy," he said. "There's a difference in the expectation in use of property by culture."
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The only thing wasted in Jay Crossley's tiny second-story room is the half-full pack of cigarettes lying in his trashcan. He tried to quit smoking this morning. (Turns out, even that got recycled. A housemate dug the carton out of the trash later that night and lit up.) Crossley is always wearing a crisp button-down tucked into clean pleated khakis — a wonder, considering he dries his clothes by hanging them on a clothesline near the compost pile. His wavy jet-black hair is well maintained, and a flash of his straight white smile is always a second away.
Betterment runs in Crossley's blood. His father David Crossley started Houston Tomorrow, a local environmental research nonprofit. It wasn't easy to get Crossley out of Austin, where he lived in three different co-ops throughout college and graduate school. He even met the woman he plans to leave Houston for and marry while crashing at his friend's co-op. Though he hated to leave, Crossley moved back to his native Houston to work for Houston Tomorrow in 2006.
One of his early projects was to survey future stops for light rail, which will snake its way almost 30 miles further than the existing line in 2012. Crossley noticed a lot of spacious vacant houses along the route. "You could buy a house for $75,000 that's going to be within a block of a light rail station," he said. "That's unheard of. That's unique in the country." The thought of restoring an abandoned house close to public transit practically screamed co-op.
Crossley started holding Houston Tomorrow workgroup sessions for anyone who was interested in the idea of creating a co-op in Houston. Every month for about two years, he went to Montrose coffee shops and hung a folder off of the table labeled "CO-OP." He met another guy, a 24-year-old named Frank Freeman, who wanted to start a co-op too. A dozen other people joined the movement, and Crossley soon realized he had enough interest to start looking for a property. Then one day, Paul Schechter showed up. "He's like, 'Hi, I'm Paul. I own a green co-op,'" Crossley said. "I'm like, 'What? The fuck are you talking about?'" Schechter, a tall, thin 30-year-old with auburn hair and a goatee, had moved begrudgingly from crunchy Madison, Wisconsin, to Houston for a job in wind energy in 2009. He had never lived in a co-op before, but many of his friends had. Since there weren't any in Houston, he decided to start one himself. A few months after he got to town, Schechter bought a house in the Third Ward and began to transform it into an energy-efficient home like those he left up north. Crossley and Schechter were a match made by the green gods above. Crossley had found his landlord and his first co-oper in the same man.
