Every six hours or so one of the cats will come over and insist gently on the kind of attention they individually like best.

Every six months or so, a clerkish wage slave who isn’t quite dead yet will peer into my wallet and say:

“Is that … a picture of an avocado where your ID is supposed to be?”

And I’ll say, yes, it is, but it’s just the picture they put on the food co-op membership card at my favorite place in the world to shop, for food, or anything else.

Normally that’s the end of it. But if the conversation continued, I’d explain to them that I don’t keep up the membership for the member savings, because I don’t even yet live in the town where the co-op exists.

In part I keep it paid up because I want to invest in the co-op still being there, if I ever do get to live in that town.

In part, it gives me a poetical membership in that town.

And in part, I do it because it’s a small exercise in anti-capitalism, which I believe in most deeply.

***

So I was very pleased to learn of a way to do housing in the same fashion.

To oversimplify a bit, you decide which of the 11 RV Parks you want to be your home base. You give the co-op fifteen grand, and in return you get a lifetime lease on a lot there–a small lot by housing standards, but a large one by RV park metrics. Maybe 75 x 50. You park there and sleep there as much as you want. You pay a monthly of about 100-150 depending on the location for things like basic Internet and road maintenance, and I think the only other significant expense would be for electric.

You can also build on the lot. A storage shed. A whole casita, as long as it doesn’t have a “bedroom” for zoning purposes (a bed, though, isn’t forbidden).

In the meantime, you have access to trash, water, a clubhouse, a community garden, and typically workshops of some kind–one park has a metal shop, another one for woodwork–it depends.

It depends, on what the people living there want and are willing to vote to support financially.

Direct democracy in action.

If you decide to leave, or kick the bucket, the lease reverts not to your heirs, but back to the co-op. It’s a non-profit, but that doesn’t mean there’s never any value added. Quite the reverse.

It’s a perfectly practical and lovely communism.

I love the idea.

The biggest downside by my lights is simply that the nearest co-op venue is still a few hours off from the city I want to dwell in.

That is a downside, but maybe also an opportunity.

Developing that opportunity would likely cost more than 15K and 100 a month …

… but still substantially less than a standard home in my dream town, where a truly habitable shelter starts becoming an option at somewhere around ten times as much.

You can learn more about the existing 11 co-op parks the same way I did, through a personal experience of it related here.