A Fascinating Dinner with Bitternut Homestead

The housing market in Syracuse is broken (read the Syracuse Housing Study), like most places. The city is majority single-family land use for housing. Let's talk about the thing giving me hope. Bitternut Cooperative Homestead is a great initiative by Frank Cetera to build a better model of housing in Syracuse. One that breeds community, affordable housing, and bettering the environment.

Let's talk about hope for a better future:

Let's first define some terms:

• Co-op (Cooperative): "For practical intents and purposes, a co-op can be defined as a building that is jointly owned by a corporation made up of all its inhabitants. When you buy into a co-op, you’re not purchasing a piece of property – rather, you’re personally buying shares in a nonprofit corporation that allows you to live in the residence." (RocketMortage)
  
  You may have interacted with one through smaller banks/credit unions. Or if you are in NYC, maybe you'll see these listed on https://streeteasy.com/.
• Intentional Community: You may have heard the term commune before especially in the context of 1960s/70s. They're different, "Cohousing is a type of “intentional community,” in which people make a conscious choice to live together as a group. However, it’s not the same thing as a commune, in which a group of families jointly own a plot of land and share all their income and other resources." (MoneyCrashers) Bitternut is an intentional community that is co-op housing, it's not a commune.

What is Bitternut Homestead?

I don't think I can do this better than quoting the prospectus.  

"The Bitternut Homestead is located at 717 Otisco St, in the Near Westside, near downtown Syracuse, NY; and provides products and services, including:

• Shared Home - a 1,900 sq. ft. home with access to full kitchen, pantry, dining room, sitting/tv room, wood burning cast iron stove, multi-purpose room, home office space, half-bath/half-utility room, clothes washer, enclosed side-porch bicycle parking, attic and basement storage, private bedrooms, full bath on 2nd floor with walk-in shower and cast iron clawfoot bathtub, guest room.
• Affordability - 4 Residents at current $350 a month afford a whole 3-bedroom house at $1,400, under the neighborhood average of $1,446, while offering over double the space of an average apartment of 830 Sq. Ft.
• Edible Landscaping and Kitchen Gardening - All residents contribute 2 hours weekly to garden & landscape work. The value this returns is hard to measure but consider our garlic harvest as one example. By spending 2 hours together preparing beds and planting 100 cloves, we harvested 80 bulbs this year.

"

Check out their Instagram - if you are also vegetarian or just into urban farming check it out:

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Dinner:

This was the first time I had actually met Frank in real life. Somehow we were connected on LinkedIn and I'd been following Bitternut Instagram. He's a nice guy, it's very clear he's genuinely passionate about this.

Also, this was the first time I had met the other guests at the table.

Frank made a great meal from veggies from their garden, a guava paste salsa from Cuba, and a wonderful gooseberry jam from the garden with the churro waffles.

David educated me on student housing co-ops in Ann Arbor that was started in response to a lack of affordable housing. Could students do that here?

Could the residents of Syracuse do that?  Well, they are and we'll get to that.

Notes:

Other student housing groups:

• Cornell
  • Not fully related but Cornell has a whole website about co-ops in their general form and founding them. Very interesting stuff - http://cooperatives.dyson.cornell.edu/
• MIT

Lindsey told me about another co-op in Syracuse, Bread and Roses, (Facebook is more up-to-date). As well as Syracuse Grows, a network of community gardens in Syracuse.

There was talk about the co-op model and how the shares work. Class A vs B and the roles and responsibilities included in them. I like how the higher the investment of money you put in (Class A) you get voting rights but to retain ideological investment there is also a work requirement in it.

Also, in general, there was talk about community and foraging for wild plants in the city.

Community is a key to their success, there is something very special happening there.

After learning about co-ops my mind is racing with ideas of could I start one?

So I've now rented "Utopia Drive" by Erik Reece to learn about the current landscape of commune-ish intentional communities and "America's Communal Utopia's" edited by Donald E. Pitzer to get a historical lens on it from the library.

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