Own The Hell Out Of It

Originally published by ZNet

There’s a point in every crisis; housing, labour, democracy, take your pick – where you realise the system isn’t just broken, it’s working exactly as designed. And usually, that realisation can happen as early as taking your first step on soil that’s already borrowed, bought and broken before you ever arrived.

For me, that understanding started in Salford. Not the glossy council-brouchure Salford of waterfront apartments and artisan dog biscuits, but the Salford Walter Greenwood sketched in Love on the Dole. A place where “poverty was an unwelcome lodger in every home”, where whole streets lived under the shadow of the slum clearances and where, by the 1960s, some of the worst housing in Western Europe was still being swept under municipal carpet. I grew up in the long afterglow of all that: terraces where the damp crept quicker than the gas meter, neighbours who’d lend you their last teabag one day then steal your ginnel the next, and a quiet working-class certainty that no angel was coming to save us. And now, at 27, a lad from that same city with a credit score so low it needs stabilisers, I’m expected to ‘get on the ladder’ in a housing market that looks more like a barbed wire fence.

Maybe that’s why, on a day I felt particularly close to starting a small, localised revolt of my own, I stopped dead while doom-scrolling through an article on co-operatives and stumbled across the work of David Lidz and Waterbottle Cooperative in Baltimore: a worker-owned Cooperative flipping derelict houses into beautiful homes, and re-writing the script on ownership while they’re at it. So I reached out to David to talk about homes, ownership, and why rebuilding communities might be the last honest form of democracy left.

Jack Clarke: To begin, could you introduce yourself and the Water Bottle Cooperative, and explain the work you do there?

David Lidz: Waterbottle Cooperative is a cooperative that buys and renovates severely distressed row homes in historically oppressed West Baltimore neighbourhoods. It uses the work of renovating those row homes to hire and train, and put on career paths, what we would call marginalised workers.

So often it’s folks coming back from prison, or coming up from addiction, or trying to escape street violence, or coming from another country and trying to get a fresh start. We hire those folks into our construction jobs and into other jobs within the co-op. And then once we finish a row home, we present it to the world as fully renovated homes at affordable rates.

And the final piece is that we keep all these homes that we are renovating in a portfolio that is owned by those same workers. And now that we are starting to gather a significant tenant pool, we’re having a conversation about how we invite tenants into ownership of the portfolio. And so what you get out of that is a kind of community equity vision or model for rebuilding neighbourhoods, which we offer up in stark contrast to the normal gentrification, which would push out all those people I just described under normal circumstances.

Once someone has a conviction on their record, what are the biggest barriers they face, especially around work and housing?

Once you’ve had an arrest or conviction, it gets harder and harder to get what would be, you know, we might call a middle-class job.

And if you’re growing up in a poor neighbourhood, it’s not like you had access to those anyway, right? There are just so many cards dealt against you. You know, underfunded schools, having to walk tough streets every day of your life, having parents who have lived through trauma and oppression and are now having to, you know, try to raise a family under those circumstances, like just stacked in secret.

So there is all of that going on on top of the big economic trends that we already know about, which is de-industrialisation and globalisation. Baltimore – you may not have known this, had a steel mill called the Bethlehem Steel Plant, which in its heydays in the 60s and 70s was the biggest steel producer in the United States. Right. But Bethlehem is long gone, and so are all the auto manufacturers that planted themselves near Bethlehem because it was a good place to be near the steel mill. Those are all gone.

So there just aren’t a whole lot of middle-class blue-collar jobs left. Cool thing, this speaks to what’s really cool about what we do, is because you know what there are a ton of around here in Baltimore? There are a ton of crumbling brick vacant homes. And you know what else there is? There’s a shortage of good affordable homes, right?

So, right there, there’s just this natural synergy that’s been dropped in our laps, which is to say, you know what? If we could just get a little money to buy these houses and renovate them, we could create one of the last safe blue-collar jobs that there is and that there probably will always be, and that is construction. I don’t see robots replacing construction and you can’t ship construction overseas, right? That seems to be proving out and just working out well. Like, these are great jobs and there’s plenty of work to do in Baltimore and we do seem to be scaring up some funding to do it.

Baltimore has a long tradition of workplace democracy, yet many Americans still don’t know what a co-op is. Why do you think that is, and who benefits from that lack of awareness?

That is also such a great question because it is not at all a new tradition, and it’s also extremely apolitical. There is some cool legislation passing the United States Congress right now that is supporting worker-owned cooperatives. Did you just hear what I said? There is legislation moving through the United States Congress,  because there isn’t much of that because of the partisan divide. Like, they can’t agree on anything, but one thing they can agree on is, you know, worker co-op is kind of good. Democrats love it because it lifts up the working class. Republicans love it because it’s the working class kind of lifting up themselves, right?

We’re just asking for the same kind of access to business investment that normal corporate structures get, right? And if you let us have that, and you let us own our factories and our businesses, you know, the cooperative structure is actually a much more durable and local economy-lifting kind of enterprise. One way you can think about it is: if all of these auto plants that got transplanted to other countries during de-industrialisation had been employee-owned, like, if you were an owner of the car plant in your neighbourhood, do you think you would vote to send it to Asia? You wouldn’t, right? You’d find a way to make it work in that neighbourhood.

Yeah, and you’re right, there’s like this taboo. I was on a call yesterday where it was a bunch of cooperative folks trying to figure out how to get the message across to philanthropy, which is also just kind of chilled to the whole idea. Like, it doesn’t check their boxes and they’re not sending a whole lot of money into our ecosystem. And it was the same thing: this call was people talking about how not to use the word ‘cooperative’ when you’re talking to a large foundation because they just don’t get that, and it sounds a little like central planning. So don’t do that; just talk about the fact that you’ve got a great jobs programme going on or a great housing programme and just leave out that cooperative stuff.

It goes at the government level too. I recently testified for a bill that would give Maryland its first cooperative legal structure, a Limited Cooperative Act, which we got passed. But damn it, if there wasn’t one guy from rural Maryland on that committee who actually put the question out to us like, “Oh, cooperatives, that’s a little bit like a politburo, isn’t it? Isn’t that Stalinism?” And no, it’s not Stalinism. It’s the exact opposite of Stalinism. It’s the exact opposite of central planning.

I’m rambling, but it’s really a stunning question, and I think maybe a much shorter answer is: we do need to have a much more robust conversation within the cooperative movement about messaging. I think this is also a problem of the left in general. Like, how have we lost the middle class and the working class? Also cooperatives? How does the working class not know that it’s better to own the business that you work for than to have some oligarch own it? How is that not just common sense and well understood?

You’ve talked about ‘recovering’ houses like people in recovery. Why do you think recovery, personal and political, is such a missing lens in how we talk about economics and community?

So I was in recovery myself and very passionate about this new life that I found, and really saw that connection that you’re making, which is we would come into these foreclosures, these houses that had once been a home for a family, a spiritual vessel, just like a human body is, I think, a spiritual vessel. And I saw this connection here. I was trying to repair this spiritual vessel that was me at the same time as trying to breathe a new life into abandoned houses.

I do have an economic view that I’ve come to after 20 years of trying to make sense of this work that I kind of stumbled into. It has to do with a belief in what we might call a solidarity economy or a cooperative economy, which is:

Capitalism has done a great job of crowding out those who don’t have a shit ton of wealth to begin with. And, you know, I think we are on the verge of seeing capitalism destroy everything, the Republic of the United States and the planet and a whole bunch of other things. And I think the root cause of the destruction that we are on the brink of is because ownership, stakeholdership of stuff we take for granted, has just been denied to so many people.

With housing increasingly out of reach for ordinary people, how do you define ownership, and how is Water Bottle offering an alternative vision of belonging?

When we finish a project, the first thing we do is we offer the rental to workers, the workers who were there, who rebuilt this whole thing.

By the way, we haven’t talked about the condition that we take them in. Usually it’s three walls with the roof and the basement, no rear wall, and maybe two levels of trash and debris that we have to clean out too. So it’s a lot of work, right, to take that and turn it into a beautiful, liveable home. So after having done all that work, some of our workers choose to become renters of a property that, because they are members of the co-op, they also own. That is what I mean, they own the hell out of that house because they were there the day that we first unscrewed the boards and started digging the trash and the rat shit out of it, you know. And they took it all the way through framing and systems and drywalling and painting. And so they own the hell out of that house.

But to your more, the broader question, what we are also offering is that opportunity to rent and become a member of the cooperative that owns that portfolio to the broader community. So that opens up a couple of things. If you are a tenant renting one of our homes and now become a member of the cooperative that maybe owns 300 of the thousand in that particular quadrant of Baltimore, you have a different kind of home ownership, but it is a significant amount of power. It is a significantly new way of thinking about ownership in your community. It is a new way of thinking about place.

But the other thing it does too is we’re in the very early stages of this and there’s a ton of financial modelling and restructuring we have to do, but the vision that we espouse is that a tenant who moves in on day one can be what we would call credit compromised. Maybe they would not have gotten a rental like the ones we have offered from other property management companies because we’re pretty open about inviting people in. And maybe they would never get themselves to the point where they could achieve home ownership,  they could qualify for a mortgage.

But with our model, we’re saying: if you stay with us over time, we will distribute equity in this growing portfolio over time. So that by the end of 20 or 30 years, if you’ve stayed with us, the amount of equity that you own will have the cash value as if you had bought your own home. So this opens up all kinds of cool discussions and ways of thinking better about home and home ownership in the United States.

In other words, you do not have to be fixed to an asset to achieve real estate wealth. If you never quite get that perfect, that 620 credit score and the $10,000 in the bank and all that stuff, you can still have a path to real estate wealth that you can accumulate and pass on to your children and to their children without having to do the traditional stuff. I think when we talk about cooperative thinking, all these kinds of new possibilities open up.

You’ve drawn inspiration from Argentina’s recovered factories and the landback movement. What international struggles are shaping your work, and what should those of us in the US and UK be paying attention to?

Yes. The Take, you can watch that video on YouTube. The community development financial institution that has loaned us all these millions of dollars is an institution called Seed Commons, and one of the founders and current directors was there as a journalist and I think business major when these takeovers were happening in Argentina, and so he watched that and came back here and started this movement that is now Seed Commons. So we are deeply connected and rah about that tradition.

To your question, I recommend the film, and what you see there is all of the classic components: oligarchs who are stripping the country of its wealth. The country is in crisis. So what do the oligarchs do? They disinvest. They grab all the cash they can and they leave. Right? So they’re literally trying to sell off the assets of working factories to cash out before the economy totally collapses and fuck the workers, you know, right? Sorry. And that to heck with the workers.

Another great take from The Take is the workers are like: hell no. The workers stand up, they organise, and they even take it beyond union organisation, which is typically just striking. They take it to: we are going to seize this asset. We’re going to take control of it. We’re going to get it running again and we’re going to figure out a way to run this as a business.

So, same thing I described when you look at the assets when you’re driving around West Baltimore and you see all these crumbling homes, same thing. Like, why the hell aren’t we just taking that and fixing it and then building this economic base for ourselves? If you have that land, if you turn that land into functioning real estate, you’ve got wealth and power. They did that.

But the other key thing that they did is they, and I don’t think you get this so much in the film, you have to study a little deeper, is that they got the judiciary on their side and they got some, they didn’t have to do a whole lot of legislative tweaking, but they did have to do some legislative tweaking. There was some little law that they needed to have a couple of little sentences changed to make it possible for the judiciary to rule in their favour when this whole thing went to court and the oligarchs tried to get their factory back, and the courts ruled: nah, you left; this now belongs to the workers. Done deal. It’s done. See you.

So there was this element of limited government advocacy, but I think we can’t forget that you do have to get organised and you do have to get some political power for your revolution to work.

You’ve grown wages from $11 to $48 an hour, built 25 homes, and have 30 worker-owners with a target of 200 homes by 2026. With that trajectory, what does the future look like, in Baltimore and beyond?

Yeah, it’s all of those. It is amping up our capacity so that in Baltimore we can get to the hundreds of properties in the next couple of years and into the thousands of properties at the end of ten years or so. And it is also transplanting this model to other cities.

And we, part of the restructuring that we’re doing, is creating a cooperative development element and a finance element that we could use to transplant our model in, say, Detroit or in Appalachian towns like Cumberland, Maryland, or Cleveland, Ohio, and so on. And then we’re also building this out so that we could do that. These are, each one of these little neighbourhood portfolios that we develop, a hyper-localised economic engine, and it’s supposed to be that.

So, you know, you’re empowering local workers with good wages and a sense of ownership to get to work in that community. And then they rent the homes, and then they frequent the restaurants and spark the founding of new restaurants, and they go to the local petrol stations and the local auto repairs and so on. But it’s all very hyper-localised, which is what we want it to be.

A decade after Freddie Gray’s death, his absence still haunts Baltimore. How has his legacy influenced Water Bottle, and what does rebuilding really look like in a city so long abandoned by power?

Yeah, the Baltimore uprising. I was down there that day. We had started this work that we’re doing in West Baltimore prior to all that going down. We’ve been in West Baltimore since 2006 and 2007. So, where the uprising took place was blocks from the first neighbourhood that we started this model in.

Freddie Gray was a young Baltimore kid. I see these kids all the time. They don’t have a whole lot to hope for. Often their bodies and minds have been poisoned by lead. And when they’re not poisoned by lead enough, there’s a bunch of vendors on every corner who’ve got other poisons for them. And when they don’t have any economic hope, those vendors on the corner are the only role models that they see. So they often join that business. And then when they join that business, the prospects for the future aren’t great. It could be others in that business who do them in for good. And if it’s not them, it’s the police. If they’re lucky, only lock them up. If they’re unlucky, do what they did to Freddie Gray, which is to rough him up in such a way that he died.

That’s who Freddie Gray was. I was there when the CVS was burning. It’s a big, huge question. There’s so much to describe there. There were a lot of things that I saw. I saw the burning that happened. I saw the CVS being looted. The day after, I went into the CVS while it was still being looted, and I saw probably a 12-year-old kid who was rifling through what was left with a, you’ll love this, a Guy Fawkes mask on the back of his head. Really surreal and poignant and powerful. I still don’t quite know how to interpret that, but there were moments like that.

I saw the next day where that intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Reisterstown Road was cordoned off. Many community marching bands showed up and just started turning this into, I don’t know if you’d call it a celebration, but a moment of hope. Amazing bands playing and pompom girls cheering. I saw a line of police with their shields and helmets trying to cordon off that section on Pennsylvania Avenue, I guess trying to prevent the uprising from moving up Pennsylvania Avenue. They were standing there, and there was a line of local residents standing in front of them with their backs to them and their faces looking forward. These were local residents in solidarity with the police. These were residents who were interested in seeing the situation calm down and in there being a peaceful resolution to this, which throws a whole lot of nuance into our narratives about how the police are viewed in Baltimore.

Anyway, to your question, to get back to where we need to be on this, the neighbourhood that we were in was a couple of blocks north from there, a neighbourhood called Park Circle. And shortly after the uprising, that neighbourhood started to turn around and it became harder and harder for us to get new houses, old houses to work on. So we made a conscious decision to choose our next neighbourhood to be Freddie Gray’s neighbourhood, which is a neighbourhood called Sand Winchester.

So that thing you said, where it was a call to build, we took that quite literally. We went to Sand Winchester, and that’s where we are now. Sandtown and the neighbouring neighbourhoods of Matthew Henson and Easterwood are where most of our homes and most of our activities are. And I don’t know, I think that’s pretty cool. There was the uprising. It was a cry out, and we responded by looking to rebuild that very neighbourhood.

Photo by Jack Clarke.