Staples: Between A ROC And A Hard Place

By Bob and Sandy Staples, NH Journal

We’ve lived in our manufactured housing community in New Hampshire since 2016.

When residents voted to purchase the park and form a cooperative in 2019, we supported it. We stayed, participated, and tried hard to make it work. One of us served on the board as secretary. But after years inside a resident-owned cooperative — one of the larger ones in the state — we’ve come to believe that something important is being left out of the public debate.

The media’s simplistic narrative that resident ownership is always the right answer or that private investors are all rapacious villains is wrong. Our story is proof of that.

Any resident-owned community, or ROC, needs a governance structure that is open to accountability. But that accountability gets complicated fast when the people running your community are also your neighbors. Our community has nearly 300 homes. While it is the land we live on, it is also a multimillion-dollar operation, with water infrastructure, sewer systems, roads, maintenance contracts, insurance, legal fees and all the rest. Managing it well requires expertise that most residents, through no fault of their own, don’t have and tasks they haven’t been trained to carry out. In our experience, residents have little recourse when the board makes a decision without following its own bylaws. All too often, important questions about finances, maintenance contracts, and how vendors are selected and paid go unanswered. When that happens, there’s no management company to which you can escalate your concerns. There’s just a board of your neighbors.

We’ve experienced these complicated dynamics firsthand. After raising procedural objections at board meetings and noting that the board wasn’t following its own rules, Bob was expelled from the cooperative’s membership. He was stripped of any formal voice in the organization to which he belongs and which he helps fund as a resident. At one point, a no-trespassing notice barred him from attending the very meetings he was still technically entitled to attend. All of this happened because he spoke up.

The phrase “resident ownership” implies that all residents have a voice. But a voice that can be revoked by a neighborhood squabble isn’t worth much.

We’re not writing to argue that cooperative communities can’t work. We believe they can, especially smaller ones where governance stays manageable. We also understand the fear that drives cooperative conversion campaigns: the worry that a large outside company will buy the park and change everything overnight. But too often, these fears are used to drive communities like ours to accept a cooperative model. While there are bad actors in every industry, we would certainly take investor ownership over the failed cooperative we have now.

Our community meetings draw maybe 10 people out of nearly 300 households. A handful of our neighbors make financial and operational decisions that bind everyone else — when they even manage to gather a quorum — with little transparency and few consequences when things go wrong. As members of a resident-owned community, we are deeply disappointed in how our cooperative has played out, and many of our neighbors share our frustrations.

The manufactured housing debate in New Hampshire deserves more nuance than it’s getting. It’s a convenient narrative to frame cooperative ownership as “good” and private ownership as “bad,” but the truth is a lot more complicated.

Bob and Sandy Staples live in Allenstown. They wrote this for NHJournal.com.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.