In a co-op apartment, each tenant owns his or her own unit
and has shares in a corporation that owns the apartment. Joining together
collectively as a mini-government or a semi-socialist enterprise, the
corporation (or a management company it hires) employs a superintendent and a
number of doormen and porters. These people are kept busy—they open the doors,
sort the mail, accept the delivery of packages, help carry groceries, clean the
shared areas of the building, keep the boiler and washer-dryers operational, do
minor repairs, enforce building rules (of which there are always many), hail
taxis and keep track of the various workers hired by tenants to work in their
individual apartments. To get these
services, the apartment owners all pay a monthly fee—more for larger apartments
or those on higher floors (which require more time for the building personnel
to serve). Most owners also give the
staff seasonal bonuses at the end of the calendar year.
The other day I was thinking about how convenient it would be
to apply the co-op/doorman model to blocks of single-family dwellings. Someone
to keep the street safe, accept packages, clean snow and ice off the sidewalks,
help carry the groceries in and maybe even serve as the block handyperson for
simple faucet leaks and picture-hanging. Having the block equivalent of a
doorman would certainly make life easier for everyone who owns a single family
home in a city and many suburban neighborhoods.
But then I started thinking about the major impediment to
such a plan working—the selfishness of Americans. After three decades of the
politics of selfishness, wouldn’t many if not most homeowners worry that
someone else on the block was using too many of the services offered by the
staff? Wouldn’t some people try to “get the most” out of their monthly fees and
try to use the staff all the time?
Wouldn’t most Americans reject the block staff concept outright because
of the same shortsighted, I’ve-got-mine selfishness that makes people vote to
cut support of public schools and mass transit?
While selfishness and other human foibles can muck up the
management of a co-op apartment building, the owners are united in one way that
forces them to become part of the social compact that generates all the
benefits provided by the building’s staff: They all live together in the same
building with the same roof, the same elevator and stairs, the same lobby and
most important, the same source of hot water, heat and electricity. The only
choice anyone has is to be a responsible co-op citizen interested in the
overall welfare of the apartment.
And then the big idea hit me: Doesn’t the co-op model have a
place in solving our energy crisis? Specifically, we already have the technology
to build small solar-powered electrical generating plants that can provide the
electricity for a few city blocks. Many theorists of solar power have often
conceived of a situation in which instead of one central power plant that
serves large metropolitan areas, there are many smaller plants throughout a
region, each of which produces electricity for its neighborhood and all of
which are connected to the national grid.
Utilities and politicians don’t like the individual solar plant model,
because they lose control of the power source and the ability to make money
from it. But for the public, why should it matter if the power comes from a
behemoth plant miles away or from a modest unit tucked out of the way around
the corner? If I may speak for most—what
we want is a steady source of electricity that doesn’t pollute the planet and
is not threatened by energy scarcity.
The co-op model can make the neighborhood solar plant work.
Every house on the block must own a share of the power plant, just as every
owner of an apartment must have shares in the building. The building hires the staff
to take care of the plant. The natural extension would be for the staff to
provide many of the services that make co-op living so pleasant.
I’ve pretty much described a utopian dream which combines some of the best elements of socialism and capitalism to give people more control over their lives in some ways in return for certain restrictions, all of which are for the common good.
Of course, as long as world governments are more interest in
solutions that require large organizations, it is nothing more than a
dream.
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