Building Community One Co-op at a Time	by Peter Koch

If you walk down the hard-luck final block at the north end of Chenango Street, you might be surprised to find a house that’s seemingly stepped out of Allentown. Tucked among the rows of drab duplexes, the house at 129 Chenango Street is experiencing a rebirth at the hands of People United for Sustainable Housing, the first sign of which is a bright pink paint job (although the can claims that it’s “Allentown Clay” and PUSH co-founder Aaron Bartley describes it as “Salmon”). That’s part of the point, though. PUSH Buffalo isn’t just rehabbing the house, it’s making a statement to the whole neighborhood: we’re an agent of change, and we’re here to stay.

PUSH intends to turn this house, its second in the community, into a housing cooperative that’s modeled after it’s first one. The house, which was gifted by an elderly West Side resident for $1 and came with about $1,000 in back taxes, has turned out to be a bargain for PUSH.

Co-founder Eric Walker recently walked me through the house, along with Carlos Ortiz, who’s been hard at work on the renovations. The house looks really good inside compared to many empty buildings on the West Side. It is already framed and mostly gutted, which will save PUSH a lot of time and effort. There are odd pieces of insulation hanging from the walls and ceilings, but mostly what’s there are solid floors and a good start at solid walls.

You can already picture the three-unit cooperative it will become, with a studio and 2-bedroom apartment on the first floor, and a larger, 3-bedroom flat occupying the second. With the consulting help of two ecologically-minded professors—Kevin Connors of UB’s architecure school and UB Law’s Sam Magavern—PUSH is “greening” the building through straightforward, low-cost methods. Installing high-rated insulation for exterior walls, on-demand water heaters and solar panels for the roof are measures that are currently under consideration. “There’s an evolution by which we make each project greener,” Walker says. “Part of this is to help the low-income community, who is being hit the hardest by rising utility rates.” The budget for the entire renovation is $158,000, half of which has already been raised.

Ortiz, who works for PUSH renovating 129 Chenango, is an example of the type of community building that the organization promotes. Two summers ago, Ortiz “got into some trouble.” A judge ordered him to do community service, and he worked for Growing Green. Through that organization, he became involved with PUSH and helped renovate their first cooperative, located only a block away at the corner of Massachusetts and 19th Streets, where he now lives. The first house is so close it can be easily seen from the sidewalk in front of 129 Chenango. There, along with a handful of other co-op members, he’s participating in an innovative new program that will soon make him a proud homeowner.

Administered by M&T Bank, the federal First Home Club home-buying program allows co-op members to pay low rent while putting away money to buy a home. Tenants pay below-market rent, and each month PUSH places $75 of it into the program. M&T matches the grant on a 3-to-1 basis for 18 months, at the end of which a tenant is required to buy a home that they’re obliged to finance through M&T. Homefront Inc., a non-profit home ownership center in Buffalo, helps give tenants the know-how and financial savvy they need to own their own homes.

Walker refers to the whole thing as a “grand experiment” as he describes the process by which PUSH arrived at its current plan. With the original idea to “tie rental housing to some sort of asset building mechanism.” In other words, rather than tossing money away on rent, why not find a way to save some of that money and put it towards buying a home? They toyed with several ideas like having a limited equity housing cooperative or using individual development accounts to save money. In the end, though, they settled on the federal home loan bank program, which, he says, has been “a match made in Heaven.”

Currently there is a diverse handful of people taking part in the program, all of whom live in the cooperative at 456 Massachusetts Ave. They include Dashmily Noriega, a single Puerto Rican mother, and her son; Trinidadian Augustine Gilchrist; the family of Burmese political dissident Zaw Win (hear Zaw speak about his experiences fighting for democracy in Burma on Saturday, July 14 at 1:30pm at the headquarters of Massachusetts Ave. Project, 271 Grant Street) and then, of course, there’s Carlos. He wants to own a house somewhere around here. “This is my neighborhood,” he says, referring to the fact that he grew up only blocks away on Lafayette, “and I’m never going to get out of here.” And when he buys that house, he won’t have to hire anybody to fix it up, thanks to the job training he’s getting from PUSH.

This is the model that PUSH hopes to build upon throughout the West Side. It’s a full circle approach to community development that creates self-sufficiency out of direct neighborhood investment. As Walker says it, “We are giving them the tools they need to be engaged members of their community.”

It’s a small grand experiment, yes, but one that seems destined to succeed.