History of Marsh Commons
(The following article was excerpted from Spring
1998 Communities Magazine. It is now Winter 1999 and we are happily living in
our cohousing community.)
After 6 years of planning, dreaming, and hard
work, Marsh Commons cohousing in Arcata has finally begun construction on 9 of
its 13 housing units.
We bought the property in 1993. The first in a
string of serious melodramas began in January 1995, after we had commenced
renovation on the 50 year industrial building that was to become our lovely
Common House. We discovered major structural damage that had to be corrected,
raising the cost approximately $40,000. We finished the building in June and
were fortunate to find good long term tenants (a computer retail store, a massage
therapist, and two audio/video repair businesses) for the commercial side of
the building. It is large, 7,000 sq. ft., and the rentals pay almost all of the
building costs, including mortgage, insurance, and operations.
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With the Common House complete, we finalized the
housing designs, a process that had begun in 1992 when the land was first
optioned. Because the project is located in a city renewal area, the Arcata
Redevelopment Agency gave us a $35,000 grant to improve the sidewalks and
public landscaping around the community. We used the money to build several
hundred feet of new sidewalks, and street bumpout/planter/traffic slowers, and
to plant riparian vegetation along the marsh zone.
Finally, after securing enough members, we
committed in early 1996 to begin construction. Because we are adjacent to a
wildlife sanctuary on the
We found a professional and sympathetic contractor
who was willing to work with a diverse and vocal group of member/developers.
The contractor was also interested in sustainable building design and
materials, an issue near and dear to us. Our bank helped us find an appraiser
who was willing to be educated about cohousing in order to come up with
appraisals that approximated our real costs. We qualified our members as
buyers. We located sustainable lumber and other appropriate building materials
and got final approval from the building department Then it was time to secure
financing.
THE
BANKING CRISIS
It was late summer 1996, and the northcoast rainy season was only a month away.
Our small local bank dropped a bombshell. Our 1 million dollar plus construction
loan had been too much for them, and they had gone to another bank to
co-sponsor the loan. At the last minute, this secondary bank pulled out of the
agreement, leaving us without funding. With some threats, brinkmanship, and
creativity we found a new banking strategy. We each bought our individual lots
and took out separate, smaller construction loans. The final signing entailed
136 notarized signatures. It also required close to $50,000 in down-payments
from each family.
Then the next crisis. We discovered that we needed
about $70,000 more than expected for the construction loan. We secured the
money in three ways. We got a $28,000 private loan from a friend of cohousing,
a $15,000 unsecured loan from the bank, and the rest ($25,000) was made up by group
members who contributed what they could.
We were ready to go. Because our site is located
on Humboldt Bay mud and in
OUR ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER
We were nearing completion of the foundation hole when a neighbor called
We were shocked. We thought we had done our
homework. At the time of the offer to purchase the property, we had required a
³phase one² environmental report that showed this property sufficiently clean
for residential construction. That phase one engineering firm did not find
anything wrong. So we found an attorney to get to the bottom of our newfound
dirt. He is a hot-shot environmental lawyer (one of the lead attorneys on the
THE
CLEANUP
Fall 1996. We had 3,000 cubic yards of dirty dirt that we could not put back in
the hole. Most of it lay on adjoining
The city attorney was concerned about our dirt on
sensitive city land and called for its removal. We would have to move all the
dirt back into the pit temporarily while we figured out a remediation plan.
This would have added $30,000 to the cleanup. We lobbied the city council for
mercy and received a $15,000 loan in the form of further soil testing, high
quality plastic to cover the dirt, and equipment and manpower to pump out the
pit which was rapidly filling with winter rainwater. We knew that if we didn¹t
have a final solution by winter 1997 the dirt would go back in the hole, there
would be no compaction, and our project would be dead.
We wanted to get out. It was desperate, and we
were panicky, angry with the gods, each other, the city, the state, and the
previous owners. There was no way to leave or even sell out because California
State Water Quality Control had nailed us as the owners of contaminated
property and thus responsible for its cleanup. We were so discouraged that we
fantasized about paving the entire site and selling it to a fast-food
franchise. We held on. Luckily, the Water Quality board had also named some
previous owners as responsible parties, and we were not completely alone. Our
cohousing group sought bids for remediation plans and were told that it would
cost us between $300,000 and $400,000 to clean up this dirt. We looked at
bio-remediation using fungus, cattails, and micro-organisms, thermal
disorption, hauling to a certified site more than 150 miles away, and several
other technical and very expensive strategies. We owned 200-300 large dump
truck loads of dirty dirt plus further undetermined ³hot spot² excavation and
it was winter and cold and dreary.
We almost lost our civility. By this time we had
spent more than $100,000 for attorneys, soil consultants, engineers, laboratory
work, and additional site excavation and maintenance. Our meetings were dismal
and chaotic, and the consensus process had completely deteriorated. We may have
disintegrated if a pair of angels had not appeared. Lynnette and Stuart
Staniford-Chen, previously of N-Street cohousing in
THE SETTLEMENT
Lots of
attorneys started to meet with other attorneys. The city attorney, our
attorneys, previous owners¹ attorneys, and the attorney of the engineering firm
that wrote the original phase one report okaying this project exchanged memos.
And met. And talked on the phone. And met. The end result, after 8 months of
negotiation, was an agreement to haul away the petroleum-contaminated dirt. It
turns out that a previous owner owns 11 acres of land in an adjoining community
and another previous owner owns a trucking firm. They agreed to cart away the
dirt to their property where it could be bio-remediated slowly, the way nature
intended. The City of
About this time our one of our members received a
cryptic phone call city employee. She said ³Tell your people to weed the north
side of their property,² and hung up. We were confused. Just last week we had
carefully weeded the rose beds on that side of the building. We talked about it
and decided perhaps she mistook our irrigation lines for marijuana production
equipment (after all, this is Humboldt Co.) or that maybe someone had snuck
onto our property and was in fact growing the evil weed. A thorough search
revealed nothing. A call back to the city got the full story. Our excavation
pit, over the winter, had filled with water containing cattails, frogs, a pair
of mallard ducks, and and even a beautiful white egret. The person was
concerned that the site would be considered a wetland, and that we would not be
allowed to build. From toxic waste dump to protected wetland. We surreptiously
rented a small bulldozer and cleared the offending plantlife ourselves.
By this time, the building permit was about to
expire. The new permit would have required complete re-engineering and a new
check of our plans due to a revised state-wide building code. This would have
cost us additional time and money that the group was not able to handle. It
would have delayed the building again and pushed us beyond the 1997/98 building
season. At the last minute, we got an extension. Then we were notified that the
construction loan had expired and our banker had recommended that it be voided.
It was only the senior loan official who, with faith in our project, approved
an extension for the loan. Then two members were forced to exit from the
project when the home they had been renting when on the market. In the end,
they concluded that the only way out of severe financial loss was to build and
then sell their units. At the last minute, several members of the extended
group lent the project $6,000 to hold the permit. We had one final crisis to
meet. We had to get the bad soil out, new soil in and compacted before the
rains, otherwise no work would occur for 6 months.
WE MOVE THE THE DIRT
(This was not included for some reason in the original article but suffice it
to say, the dirt is gone. The previous owners took it away and are
bioremediating it. We will fill in the details when we can.)
WE ARE BUILDING
Winter 1997. The rainy season is here, but the weather has held off long enough
for us to complete the excavation, compact the soil, begin foundations and
start our houses. The work continues in fits and starts, in between storms. We
are all still in disbelief, but actual frames of the homes are going up. Just
last week some of us stood on the top floor of a house and looked out at the
ponds in the marsh. We are still not clear of financial woes, but at our
meetings we have once again started to discuss plans for final building design
and landscaping. We look forward to new members and continuing good luck.
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