Our HAUS

Check out pics from Houston’s first co-operative living experiment in our slideshow.

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.

When Schechter first bought the foreclosed home on Rosalie Street, the roof had a hole in it, and the floors were flooded. He had to wear a mask inside to avoid inhaling mold. The windows were broken, and copper wires and pipes behind the sheet rock had been stolen. It was a disaster.

Schechter poured $90,000 into remodeling the house and turning it completely green. Every detail is sustainable, from the 3,000-gallon rainwater cistern that powers the house’s four toilets to the solar ovens Schechter built to cook potatoes on the roof.

Schechter, Crossley and a band of volunteers fixed up the house, while professionals took care of the plumbing and electricity. Crossley formed a nonprofit, Houston Access to Urban Sustainability (HAUS). HAUS signed a three-year lease with Schechter, under the agreement that after that they would have the first shot at buying the house. Even though just four people had committed to renting, there was enough demand, Crossley figured, to fill the remaining six spaces in what came to be known as the Rosalie HAUS.

The founding four gathered new members mainly through Craigslist and Facebook, though some co-opers came to the house less conventionally. Kristen was picked up at a garden festival; Teresa was recruited drunkenly and flirtatiously at a Montrose pub crawl. Rad, who came to live in Houston after a guru appeared in a dream and told him to, was picked up at an ecstatic dance session. He couldn’t afford rent, so Rad — who also happened to realize that was his true name in a dream — paid $350 a month to sleep in his van in the driveway. (After about two months, Rad moved to Alabama to help tornado victims, presumably after being told to in a dream. He left as soon as he got there because he didn’t like the vibe of the bus station.)

Membership was essentially first-come, first-serve. Each prospective HAUS member had to be at least 21 and agree to follow a few green commandments: Thou shalt not commute alone in a car outside the Beltway for work, except if you pay carbon offsets, which no more than two people in the house may do; with the HAUS money, buy all vegetarian food; and contribute five hours of labor per week. After coming to two house dinners, they were free to sign a six- or 12-month lease, or whatever personalized agreement they could Rad their way into. Rent ranged from $585 to $700, depending on how nice the room was.

Steadily, a family of young professional idealists aged 24 to 43 was strung together. They formed an impressive collection of job résumés: a Baylor neuroscientist, a lawyer, a graphic designer, a customer service agent for oil safety supplies. They were linked by a desire to live a lower-carbon lifestyle.

Ironically, everyone in the house has a car, except for one member who is in the country only temporarily. But they make concessions: Many bike or take public transportation to work, and Schechter has a beat-up Mercedes Benz that runs on fryer grease he gets for free from a nearby Chinese restaurant.

A four-person board was created to run the nonprofit, but in the true spirit of co-ops, house members are able to overrule any of the board’s decisions. It’s what Crossley loved best about his time in Austin co-ops. “I hesitate talking like a radical, but in the co-op movement, it’s real democracy,” he said. “There is no boss.”

The house hasn’t codified many rules yet, although one of the members half-jokingly suggested it be a rule not to screw each other. Austin co-ops are notorious dens of copulation, Crossley said. “They all jump into the house and jump into bed, and then after six months it’s hell.” With an even gender split and no wedding bands, the threat of HAUS incest is pervasive. There are ways around the problem, Crossley said. “The walls are very insulated for environmental purposes, but it also means that maybe you can’t hear as much.”

Members of the house have ideas to improve all kinds of things — ideas that Houston doesn’t quite know how to respond to. Matthias Jung, one of the founding members of the house, is dusted with freckles and red facial scruff. His first name is tattooed in cursive on his tricep, flanked by what appear to be two large swans. Now 36, he quit his corporate office job to intern at Rice University’s Shell Center for Sustainability for ten dollars an hour. He asked the Midtown Management District if HAUS could take over an abandoned building at a nearby park to start a community bike shop, where he and others would help anyone seeking to repair a bicycle. Jung was turned down, and the structure was razed shortly after. That didn’t shut up Jung. He plans to propose to the Midtown Management District that it close Main Street to cars and make it solely for bikes and pedestrians. “Maybe it’s a fantasy,” he said with a hint of bravado. “But this was a dream at one point. Democracy was a dream at one point.” For the moment, he’s set on turning the co-op’s garage into a bike shop, even though it’s impenetrable with towers of boxes, two washing machines and a giant taxidermied moose head.

If the bike shop doesn’t pan out, Schechter wants to start a veggie gas station in the garage. But first he’s trying to start a community garden. HAUS’s neighbor, an auto supply store called XL Parts, owns a large vacant lot that’s been lifeless for years. Schechter thinks it would be the perfect location for a garden.

Don Pilkington, vice president of purchasing for XL Parts, thought differently when Schechter proposed the idea to him. “Uh, no,” he says he remembers telling Schechter. “I don’t think my insurance company would be overly excited about me doing something like that.”

It’s a house full of dreamers in a city motivated more by profit than by progress. Schechter knows that if they want to get anything done, they’ll have to do it themselves — until they fulfill their first goal of showing Houston it can change. “One of the problems with our demographic is that we’re quite ambitious,” Schechter said. “We have all these fantastic ideas piling up on top of each other.” The trick is finding enough time to do all, or any, of them.
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Crossley is sitting outside on his balcony one sultry June night, surrounded by his nursery of potted baby fig trees and hot peppers. From here, you can see straight into the glass living room of an expensive town home across the street.

He, too, has a priority that he knows is not shared by the group. Above all else, Crossley wants the catalog of five HAUS co-ops — the Rosalie HAUS for young professionals, one for families and at least one Austin-style shitshow college co-op — to be a racial mix. It’s something that didn’t happen with the first house, which is predominantly white and doesn’t include anyone from the Third Ward. Such a dream is hard enough to pull off now, if Coleman is right about the model not making sense to African-American adults. But it might be even harder to accomplish in the near future.

“I feel sometimes like a lone voice talking about the problem of light rail,” Crossley says. The town homes and condos that surround his house are the future for much more of the Third Ward, he says, should nobody help the neighborhood brace for skyrocketing property values. “Any other city in the world would have a plan for affordable housing, and how the people in that neighborhood can be involved in planning for their future and stay there, once it’s a much nicer neighborhood because it has access to really high-quality transit.”

With or without these co-ops, gentrification isn’t about to stop, says Danyahel Norris, an attorney and legal research instructor at TSU and longtime Third Ward resident. He first started noticing gentrification in 2000 during his senior year at UH, when he watched a crack house turn into an upscale residence. Norris wrote an article published last year in the Thurgood Marshall Law Review outlining different ways that residents of the Third Ward can hold onto their property. One major strategy is to enforce deed restrictions, neighborhood covenants designed to retain the look and character of a certain area. In unzoned Houston, they’re powerful weapons residents can use to stave off gentrification, but only if the residents know what they say. “Most of them don’t check out their deed restrictions,” Norris said.

Norris doesn’t know of a unified effort to stop gentrification in the Third Ward. Though he urged such an effort in his article, he’s not optimistic of one springing up before the rail hits.

Neither is he convinced that Crossley’s plan for a tri-school co-op is a realistic model for the neighborhood. Having gone to both UH, a public school, and TSU, a historically black university that is also public, Norris can’t imagine either of them mixing — let alone with Rice, a private school. “As nice of a thought as that is, I think when you talk about making people live together — not hang out occasionally, but when you’re talking about living in the same space…it sounds like a nice idea in theory, but the practical side is a little more difficult,” he said. Even if the co-op served just one school, Norris said that the challenges in Houston are much greater than those in Austin. Rice students have excellent on-campus housing already, making it an insular cocoon few wish to leave. TSU and UH, on the other hand, are both schools with a heavy commuter contingent. Many students at both schools have part-time jobs. Who has time to cook for ten after class and work?

Crossley admits a multicultural co-op is not going to be easy to pull off. His initial attempts at TSU fell flat. “I tried to reach out and figure out how we get a student group at TSU to lead this project,” he said. “It just didn’t work.” Crossley plans to keep trying, but if the concept of co-ops catches on only with white people, they’re the ones who will lead them. In that respect, co-ops could just become the new face of gentrification. “Personally,” Crossley said, “I am sort of torn about how this works — how this particular project, whether it’s a force for evil or good.”
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Tevas and five-toed rubber shoes form a small circle inside the Rosalie HAUS living room, where four strangers hoping to populate the next co-op are planning the house. Most of those present have lived in an Austin co-op at some point. (A medical student and recent dad raised his newborn in a co-op.) Some have brought their kids, who will be living in the family-friendly co-op with them. Prompted by Crossley, the group discusses what they want in a community: no spanking, no smoking, no drugs, no lead paint, background checks. But it really depends, some of them chime in, on where the property is.

Crossley cautiously brings up a property he’s interested in, a string of restored row houses about 15 blocks deeper into the Third Ward from where they sit now. Kristen Dempsey, the 24-year-old board secretary with red hair down to her waist, thinks the row houses would work well. “It’s like a little neighborhood,” she explains in a soft, high voice. “There’s a gazebo and a little grassy area…and another little space that could be used for a garden.”

Crossley continues. “Basically, they did a really nice job of restoring all these houses, so it might be too expensive,” he said. “And it’s 15 blocks that way.” He motions east toward Emancipation Park.

For a few moments, nobody speaks.

Crossley acknowledges the silence, adding a caveat. “Perception of that block from a lot of people who looked at it is that it’s not a very comfortable, safe place. So if no one’s actually going to actually move in there, we’re not going to do it.”

But nobody’s opposed to the idea. With all the green space enclosed in the fenced-in property, kids could play together safely. The medical student adds that being that far into the Third Ward could bring the price down.

It could be the perfect opportunity to start stirring the melting pot. Rick Lowe is the founder of Project Row Houses, an organization that transforms abandoned shotgun houses in the Third Ward into exhibit spaces for African-American artists. Lowe says he’s watched the Third Ward become more diverse since he moved here in 1997, and it’s a good thing, as long as those moving in become part of the neighborhood. “If they move into the neighborhood understanding that there are plenty of youth around that need mentors, that need all kinds of support, families and organizations that need it…if they’re coming to participate in that way, then it’s not any different than blacks or anybody else coming to the neighborhood,” he said. But if the move is to establish an insular community, it’s a different story. “Then the question becomes, why choose the location that you’re living in?”
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A couple weeks later, there’s a smaller meeting for the four-person HAUS board. Jung, the treasurer, brings refreshments. To the two women, trustee Rabea Benhalim and secretary Kristen Dempsey, neither of whom drinks, he offers organic strawberry lemonade. For him and Crossley, the board chair, a six-pack. They’re meeting upstairs in a small office at Houston Tomorrow, since Crossley forgot to book the boardroom downstairs. A group of old ladies who want to save historic neighborhoods got there first.

Beers pop open, and a page-long list of things that need to be done to the current house is passed around. The co-op has a long way to go before it’s done, from the cracked windows to the broken downstairs toilet. Even finding insurance was a struggle: No company would insure them, because no one here knows what a co-op is. Luckily, Austin co-ops suggested a company they’ve trained to understand their treehugging ways.

After the list is exhausted, talk turns to the next house. Crossley puts Jung and Benhalim in charge of finding the property, while Crossley and Dempsey will look for new people. Then Crossley brings up the row houses as a possibility. “I wouldn’t move into those,” Jung says. “It may be safe, but if your child got raped or stabbed…” Crossley interrupts, raising his voice. “The nastiest ghetto you see in Houston is way more safe than any suburb. We’re only dealing with the perception of safe. Most children in Houston get killed by being hit by a car.” Jung gets even louder. “I blackball you!” he yells. Benhalim, a 28-year-old finance attorney, reminds Jung that he’s the one in charge of finding the next house. Jung settles down, vowing to put it in the Museum District.

For now, Crossley’s melting pot dreams are dashed.

Benhalim changes the topic to the colossal pile of wood sitting in their backyard. She hates looking at it, but no one can choose what to build with it. “This house needs to decide whether we want a deck, a chicken coop, aquaponics or a hot tub,” Crossley says solemnly. “I want it all,” Jung says as he tears apart the now-empty six-pack holder. Like most other items on the agenda, the woodpile goes unresolved.

Benhalim then brings up the guest policy, which the house approved at a recent meeting. After a four-day stay, the group starts charging guests a small amount for food and board. Crossley wants it to begin after three days in order to save money. Benhalim tries to explain why the house voted the way it did, but Crossley talks over her, and louder. Benhalim slams her fists down on the table. “Do you want to finish hearing?” she shouts. “Do you realize you’re arguing about a dollar?”

“No,” Crossley yells, “I’m arguing about four dollars!”

It’s four against one, and nobody thinks Crossley’s being reasonable. The house voted, after all. “Just because Jay doesn’t like it means it doesn’t pass?” screams Jung, who pushes out his chair and jumps to his feet.

Across from him, Crossley stands to match Jung, his hands flat on the table. “This is not a democracy, you fuckers!” he yells. “This is a co-op!”
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Slowly, the co-op is growing up. With a burgeoning pool of applicants, they no longer accept month-to-month leases. Once house meetings could go on all night, but now they’re confined to 90 minutes. They’re re-evaluating the selection process, since some members believe the process should be more exclusionary. It’s coming to a vote next week. Crossley is a staunch advocate of an open system, one that is free of prejudice and pettiness. “If you believe in fairness and freedom and light and beauty, you probably should have an open system,” he said. “But I respect my co-opers, and we’re having that debate right now.”

One vision the group has never disagreed on is the importance of parties. Tonight, it’s a bit lamely co-sponsored by Mensa, but Rosalie HAUS makes up for it in booze. A spread of local-ingredient dishes, labeled in calligraphy, litters the dining room table. The people are labeled, too. Throngs of nametagged greenies of all ages converse raucously in the kitchen and living room.

Khaleel Lott, one of maybe two African-Americans out of the 50 or so people at the party, slips outside to escape the chaos. It’s his second time at the house, and though he admires the environmental mission, he says he’d never live here. “I know my culture. We’re communal, but we’re encouraged to do the same thing as Americans: to move away, get your own situation,” he says. The idea of cooking and cleaning and living with a dozen others sounds a bit too much like The Real World, he says. “Most people don’t even like doing their own dishes, much less everybody else’s dishes.”

Upstairs, across the concrete floor that will eventually be studded with Lone Star caps Crossley collects from Catbirds, is the deck that will one day have a railing. From up here, Houston’s downtown skyline is mostly blocked by shiny new town homes, though when Schechter bought the property, the entire view was unobstructed. The partial skyline is the backdrop for this evening’s installation of the Rosalie HAUS documentary, which Venezuelan co-op member Mauricio Garcia is rushing to finish before his visa expires in a month and he’s forced to leave the house — unless he can find an American girl to marry him. Tonight he’s filming co-oper Josh Stevenson, who’s on his last night in Houston.

People start stepping over the roof crack from the adjacent deck to watch the interview, one hand clutching a beer and the other the side of the house. A gold-coated dog wanders onto the roof from the adjoining room. Stevenson wears a coral long-sleeved shirt and sleek black frames. He says that he was shamed into recycling when Schechter dug through his trash, found bottles and called a house meeting about it. Since then, he’s made great strides.

He gesticulates broadly with his hands as he explains to Garcia how people who don’t live in the co-op can live more environmentally. “Becoming more sustainable is quite simple. It starts with peeing in your shower,” Stevenson says matter-of-factly. The crowd looks at each other and giggles cautiously. Is he kidding? It’s a gross tactic for 12 adults who share four showers, but he’s probably serious. “If you’re wearing jeans, you should wipe your hands on your jeans after washing them,” he continues. “This is not awkward or abnormal in any way.” You don’t have to live in a house like this to make Houston a little bit cleaner, according to Stevenson. “If you pee in the shower and wipe your hands on your clothes, you’ve saved a forest and a lake.”

Stevenson is the only member of the house who got rid of his car while living in the co-op, even though that might be a matter of circumstance. In a few hours, the U-Haul parked on the street will carry Stevenson to San Francisco, where he likely will never need a car again. Whether that same vision will be embraced in Houston, beyond this one lonely outpost, is still anyone’s guess.

mandy.oaklander@houstonpress.com