By Kara Huntermoon
We treated each new person as if they would be the answer to our problems. Our founder, Reba, begged the renters at every meeting to help figure out how to keep the land and community going. “I can’t do this!” she moaned. “It has got to be temporary! I’m near retirement, and I’m going into debt to make this project work!”
One applicant seemed good on paper: In her 60s, she had experience living in community and kept a couple of milk goats using biodynamic methods. She even brought reference letters, which described how it was easy to misunderstand her because she had attention deficit disorder and missed social cues, but we should say yes anyway because she was a great asset to any community. Some of our residents pushed hard for this woman to move in.
My husband was skeptical. “I can’t say exactly why, but I think this is a bad idea. I want to say no.”
“Well, if you can’t say why, then we should say yes! Look at all the evidence that she’s a good fit!” insisted her supporters.
We reluctantly agreed that if Leo couldn’t come up with a good reason, we would accept her as a resident. Within two weeks we regretted that decision.
She was a five-times-a-day Ritalin addict with a gun in her fanny pack. She decided that my husband was the most dangerous person on the farm, and she threatened to shoot him if he came near her. Leo is a large man, but generally soft-spoken, a pacifist, a feminist, and quite shy. We all felt baffled by the woman’s insistence that he was going to hurt her.
The police told us we could do nothing about the gun, because even without a carry permit she was allowed to have guns in her own residence. We gave her an eviction notice, but she didn’t leave. And she didn’t pay. She never signed a rental contract, and she never paid us anything. (We weren’t using rental contracts at that time; all new residents came in on a handshake deal.)
One night we were awakened at 2 a.m. by a knock at the door. A police officer apologetically explained that the woman had called to accuse Leo of stealing her gun.
“Oh, is her gun missing? Thank God!” I exclaimed.
“No, I didn’t take it, but I’m glad she doesn’t have it,” said Leo.
As this was the fourth contact we had with the police regarding the mentally ill woman and her gun, it didn’t take long to bring the officer up to date. His response? “If someone did take it, we can hope they threw it in the reservoir where it belongs.”
No such luck. She just forgot where she set it down, and she found it again the next day.
Several residents moved out because they could not stay in a house with the gun-toting woman. We did eventually get her to leave, but she wasn’t the only vignette in a six-year saga of community strife.
Ninety percent of intentional communities fail in their first 10 years. Ours was lucky: three of us stayed through the struggle, built relationships with each other, and learned together. Our big turning point came in the winter of 2013-2014, when we used our hard-won experience to reorganize the ownership and decision-making structures with the help of outside advice and investment. Since then, Heart-Culture Farm Community has become very stable in residency, very low in disruptive conflict, and financially secure. We tried and discarded many fixes along the way. Here are some lessons we kept:
Prioritize relationships. Form structures around relationships that are already working.
We tried several financial and decision-making structures based on idealism. For example, we charged a community resident fee of $300 per adult, regardless of which living space people occupied. We created committees to make decisions on different topics—but we didn’t have enough residents to fulfill the roles on those committees.
When we sat down after six years to see what was working, we noticed that the three of us (our founder Reba, my husband, and myself) were the only long-term residents. Basically all the structural needs of the community were being fulfilled by ourselves, because short-term residents dropped the ball when they moved out. We created a structure that acknowledged our commitment to each other and to the land. More on that below.
Admit to existing power/responsibility structures and form decision-making structures around those.
Reba had her name on the mortgage, so she went into debt to pay bills that would affect her credit. My husband and I built several tiny houses to rent out so the community would have more income. I took on the least-desired job of all: rental manager. Nobody wanted to be the bad-guy authority figure who communicated the rules, collected rents, and wrote eviction notices! Our financial angels put in significant funds to renovate a large house into a rentable living space, and later replaced the barn roof.
Our reorganization acknowledged the responsibility the five of us had taken on. We formed an LLC, and moved the title of the land from Reba’s name into the LLC’s name. The five of us became LLC members, with clearly-defined powers that mirrored our responsibilities. Since the owners take on more financial risk and responsibility than the renters do, our community’s financial decisions are made by consensus of the owners’ group. We solicit opinions from the renters, and all are welcome to attend owners’ meetings and speak on any topic, but renters cannot block consensus on financial decisions.
Resident consensus for accepting new renters (protect people’s sense of safety); Owners’ decision to evict (don’t make renters “be the bad-guy”).
During those turbulent years, we learned an important lesson: if the community doesn’t evict someone when we need to do so, half the residents move out in response to the unresolved conflict. This means we lose half our income, and the owners then have to cover the financial shortfall. We encountered this situation repeatedly, because our idealism led us to make all decisions by whole-group consensus.
Once, when we couldn’t figure out how to evict a problematic resident, another resident took him in. Their house, one of the largest on the property, soon became a mini-community of Occupy protesters. One memorable meeting, we discussed the septic tank. It needed pumping, and our income didn’t cover the bill. Would we renters be willing to put in any money to help with that?
“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t have anything extra.”
Our Occupiers had a different response: “You guys are the One Percent! You profit off our rent and then try to squeeze more out of us! This is oppression!”
“Wait a minute,” I protested, “I do your farm chores and take care of things here so you can go stay at the camps. This community is part of the revolution! Why are you turning on us?”
Even after I pointed out the sexism, the Occupiers (who were all men with the exception of one woman who was not a parent) insisted that my work was useless, we were the One Percent, and we wanted the revolution to fail.
Because they had become close friends with the problematic resident, everyone who shared that house ended up moving out after several more months of conflict, during which they insisted that they didn’t need to pay rent because we were the “One Percent.” Reba went into further debt to pay for the shortfalls.
Eviction is now classified as a money decision, because of the tendency to lose large amounts of income when timely evictions don’t take place. As such, it is an owners’ group responsibility to decide when to evict. The owners’ group makes decisions by consensus, but we have strong relationships with each other and a strong commitment to the land that override any personal preference we may have for one renter. Here’s how these conversations often go:
Owner #1: “I can’t live with Tom anymore. It’s been months, and mediation is not resolving the problems. I know he is your friend, and I wish I could keep doing this, but it just isn’t working.”
Owner #4: “Yes, he’s my friend, but you’re probably right. I’ve noticed other residents are stressed by him, too, and he’s not the easiest for me to get along with either. I just so wanted to help him!”
Owner #3: “Sometimes we can help people, and sometimes we can’t. We have to take care of our community first. Do you have other friends who might want to help him?”
I’m oversimplifying for the sake of brevity. We understand that it isn’t fair to ask an owner to live with someone they simply can’t get along with. It’s usually nobody’s fault; just not a good fit.
Our general rule is: All residents decide who moves in. Any resident of any status can block a new person from moving in. They don’t need to have a rational reason. We don’t want to force people to live with others who will trigger them. This protects the current relationships that are working.
Once someone is accepted for residency, the owners’ group decides if there needs to be an eviction. Only one owner needs to be certain that eviction is the right decision; the other owners will support that choice after conversation makes the thinking clear. This is technically a consensus decision to evict, but Reba came up with the following analogy during our conflict years: “We need consensus to put this pencil in my ear, but we don’t need consensus for me to pull it out.” The reason “owners’ consensus” works for evictions is because we all agree that only a single owner needs to feel that the problematic resident is like a pencil in her ear. We will support the removal of the pencil.
We solicit the input of renters on eviction decisions by having all-group mediations before the decision is made. In mediation, nobody is directly asked if they want another person to move out. Rather, we engage in a good-faith effort to resolve the conflict. Sometimes it becomes clear that we are unable to resolve the conflict with our current resources, or that the current conflict violates our residency policies. We have evicted men for perpetrating domestic violence on women and children. We evicted a woman who refused to consider the possibility that hitting her child was something she should learn to stop doing. We have also evicted people who are unable to see that their complaints about another resident are simply projections that they are personally responsible for healing (e.g., “she’s just like my mother”).
Encourage long-term residency by focusing on long-term life projects: child-raising, permaculture.
Some communities are set up as educational centers, and while these are vital to our movement, they also tend to have a large proportion of short-term residents. People move to these communities to learn something, and move out again when they feel they have learned it. Others move to educational communities to teach or administer programs, and move out again when they find a different job that meets their needs.
Heart-Culture is set up to support long-term life projects, most notably child-raising and permaculture. Our infrastructure, social systems, and economic agreements are designed to support parents and children. For example, we built children’s play areas in every indoor and outdoor communal space. The living willow fence has keyhole playhouses built into it; trellises are designed to accommodate climbing children. The large Douglas firs support a climbing pole and tire swing, with a picnic table nearby. A fenced swing-set yard attracts the smallest children; shade trees allow parents to fall asleep in the grass while gates keep toddlers from wandering off. Instead of a living room, our largest house has a play room, where kids can move the furniture and hang tapestries to make playhouses.
By focusing on parents and children, we attract people who want to stay for 20 years or more. We provide social support including free childcare trades and carpooling. It seems strange for me to describe how we co-parent each other’s children, because it mirrors the traditional “village to raise a child.” I’ve lived at Heart-Culture so long that it seems normal to me, but I hear a lot of visitors commenting that parents are a lot more isolated in other settings. All we are doing is having long-term cooperative relationships and helping where help is needed, but that seems to have become an unusual opportunity in many parts of the United States.
Owners can never get their money out: discourage medium-term “investment residents.”
Another way we encourage long-term residency is by discouraging “investment residents.” In practice, it is usually middle class people who want to know how they could get their money out again “if it doesn’t work out.” We tell them they can never get their money out again. Like most intentional communities, ours is built by committed idealists who give everything they have to a project with no excess income. If we were required to buy out owners who leave, that would create an undue hardship that might cause the community to financially fail.
We try to avoid this situation by taking three years or more to approve a new owner. We focus on building relationships that can last before we become legally and financially committed. This means everyone who moves into Heart-Culture starts as a “renter,” with a month-to-month contract. Only after we have weathered conflict, tested compatibility, and witnessed the resident’s capacity to put the well-being of the group before their own individual desires do we invite a renter to become an owner. Some people don’t qualify, even if they live here long-term. We unabashedly make new ownership decisions “by relationship.”
Our LLC agreements have not been tested by legal challenges. It’s possible that we could be required to pay off an owner after a court invalidated our LLC agreements: specifically the clause that says we don’t have to pay someone for their ownership equity if they leave. So far, we have avoided that by being up front about the fact that we are investing in our relationships at Heart-Culture. We are not an opportunity for investment with financial returns.
Ownership buy-in accessible to low-income residents: eliminate the financial barrier to long-term commitment.
Because we make decisions about new owners based on relationships and not finances, we need a way to make ownership financially accessible to low-income residents. We do this by giving the new owner a loan for the amount of their ownership buy-in, which they pay off at the same rate they were paying rent. The base amount to buy in is $40,000 for an individual, and $70,000 for a couple. The loan’s interest rate is the same as our mortgage interest rate, which in our case is pretty high (6.5 percent).
This works out to a “mortgage” of 19 years and 8 months at $300 per month for an individual living in one of our smaller spaces. That’s shorter than a typical 30-year mortgage, and a lot cheaper! After the ownership buy-in is paid off, the owner continues to pay monthly utilities and community fees ($130), but no more “rent” or housing expenses. Of course, all owners are liable to pay any bills that are not covered by the rental income, so in practice we end up shelling out for improvements, repairs, and maintenance, even after we pay off our buy-in loans.
Because all land and buildings are communally owned by the LLC members, an owner buys a “right to inhabit” on the land, not any particular structure. That allows owners to move from one housing unit to another if needed.
Address conflict rigorously and effectively: core residents with skills + outside facilitation; conflict-resolution a requirement of residency.
The number one piece of advice I give people who are starting communities is to require mediation in conflict situations. Find a mediator who lives outside the community and pay for their services. For cash-strapped new communities, this might seem like a luxury, but in my experience skilled conflict resolution services are a requirement.
If the core community members (in our case, owners) have conflict resolution skills, that makes the need for outside mediation less frequent. Smaller conflicts can be addressed by asking for third-party assistance from onsite people.
During our high-conflict years, we had several residents who refused mediation. We decided to require mediation as a condition of residency. When someone requests mediation, the parties to the conflict must participate, or face eviction. We tell everyone this rule before they move in.
At Heart-Culture, we assume that a conflict that requires outside mediation is big enough to affect the entire community. For this reason, every resident is notified and invited when a mediation is scheduled. After one recent mediation, a new resident told me, “I didn’t even know there was a problem, but I’m glad I came to watch. Now I understand what it means to live in community. It was so beautiful to see everyone be vulnerable and open to connection.”
Conclusion:
These lessons learned during our high-conflict years led to structural solutions that create stability. We no longer treat each new person as if they will be the answer to our problems. Rather, we take time to get to know new residents to see if a reciprocal relationship is possible. We encourage new residents to get settled into their lives and make relationships with their farm-mates in an organic manner. In our fast-paced society, some people find this process too slow. We will not be your instant family.
We could (and do) become truly committed “chosen family” over time. Our stability allows us to offer a type of social support that meets real human needs. Several residents have used that support to stop smoking, or to stay clean and sober. Some individuals have truly blossomed at Heart-Culture. Healing and connection leading to long-term commitment is very gratifying.
Others find that we are not the right fit for their family’s needs. This discovery is like the tide flowing out: just a part of nature’s cycles. Because we don’t need new residents to solve our problems, and a single problematic outgoing resident no longer takes half the community with her, there’s no threat; just a curiosity to see who might join us next.
Kara Huntermoon is a co-owner of the community land at Heart-Culture Farm Community, near Eugene, Oregon. She has lived at Heart-Culture for 12 years with her husband and two daughters. Kara teaches Liberation Listening, a form of co-counseling that focuses on understanding and ending systems of oppression.
Excerpted from the Spring 2020 edition of Communities (#186), “Picking Up the Pieces: New Beginnings.”