haired old men like me! The average age of the Co-op is extremely high. People are dying off. Within the next ten or fifteen years a lot of the original members of the Co-0p will not be with us anymore, so yes we do need more people, and younger people. On the other hand there is a long wait. There is talk of keeping the list at a maximum of 50 people and discouraging people from joining. When people do come along to General Meetings, new applicants, they sit there with people saying “well don’t know what you’re here for mate ...chances of you getting housed are slim’. Well its true that people are attracted to the Co-op as they feel it’s an easy way to get housed. Well its not! It’s a long haul. We have a points system which stops people voting based on their friendships or personalities. The system quantifies how long a person had been in the Co-op, meetings attended, work done for the Co-op and housing need. However a problem is there aren’t enough jobs within the Co-op for people to do in order to get points, unless the people who hold those jobs give them up. Also we have a fundamental structural problem in that we only manage 34 units in ten houses. If we had more the problem would be a lot more easily solved, things would move much more quickly. We have at the moment seven unhoused members and we can’t do anything.
SM: So the Co-op is locked in, as it were, not really able to fulfill the need of unhoused members. TB: Well yes, however there are younger members getting housed which is good. All the seven applicants are under 40 and one is about to be housed. I had a fantasy the other day that if I won the lottery I would buy a couple of houses to expand the Co-op to house some people. When I moved into the area it was the people in Short life housing and the squatters who maintained a lot of property around here, that’s kind of gone now and we don’t have the same community that is possible with alternative living. I lived in a commune in Wales where we were publishing and printing books and milking chickens and growing cows and maintaining many personal relationships. It was hard actually. Here we have a great thing where we can shut our front doors, you can have as much to do with the Co-op as you wish or as little and you’ve got your own space and are independent in that sense. It’s the best of both worlds. We might be able to expand somewhere else and buy property even further away; in our age of Internet communication we could do video meetings and make faces at each other that way. A lot of people are attracted to the Co-op though because of the West Eleven area. We have other Co-ops around, Portobello Co-op, Bramley, Seagull and W 12 but the thing that holds true is that you have to be really tenacious. There is a young woman on the un-housed list who has been a member 38