The Co-op Food Stores of New Hampshire and Vermont

added 07/29/11

by Steve Varnum
Director of Communications and Marketing,
New Hampshire Community Loan Fund

Editors Note: The Hanover Cooperative Community Fund (HCCF), our co-op’s charitable arm, is administered by the Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation (TPCF). TPCF’s sponsor, Associated Cooperatives (AC), recently invested $65,000 in the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, adding to the $300,000 already invested here by TPCF.

When Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation’s family recently added to their investment in the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, they strengthened a little-known cooperative movement that is bringing stability and security to thousands of low-income households.

Manufactured-housing communitie —sometimes called mobile home parks—are a crucial source of affordable housing in the United States. That’s especially true in rural towns like those in New Hampshire and Vermont, where family-size apartments are rare.

Most people living in manufactured-housing communities own the homes they live in, but not the land beneath them. Typically, the land is owned by a for-profit company, which charges the homeowner a “lot fee”—rent for the land’s use. This arrangement, combined with home financing that is more like an auto loan than a mortgage, has created a class of homeowners whose houses decline in value and who have no voice in rent prices, park rules, and upkeep of roads and water systems.

They are more vulnerable than apartment dwellers. Moving because of a steep rent hike or the lack of park maintenance means having to find a buyer for the home. And if the landowner decides to close the park, families lose their not-really-mobile homes and all the sweat and money they’ve put into them.

In 1984, the brand-new Community Loan Fund found a solution. It helped a group of homeowners in the lakeshore town of Meredith, New Hampshire, form a cooperative so they could prevent their park’s sale to real estate developers (who almost surely would have evicted them).

Today, 97 manufactured-housing communities in New Hampshire are owned and managed by resident cooperatives. Most were financed by the ROC-NH™ program of the Community Loan Fund, which also supports the co-ops by providing management skills and leadership training, problem solving, and by lending and/ or helping arrange loans and grants for large infrastructure projects.

Without investors like the Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation(TPCF) and its Cooperative Community Fund, these innovations would not be possible, says Alan Cantor, the Community Loan Fund Vice President for Philanthropy.

This cooperative movement has had a powerful impact on the roughly 5,500 families in those parks. Along with the stability and security that co-op ownership provides, renters become owners. The Community Loan Fund was able to offer fair, fixed-rate mortgage loans, enabling home values to grow. “Parks” of strangers become communities in the best senses of the word. People who never knew what a board of directors was, or what a board did, discovered untapped leadership skills.

“Despite its small size, New Hampshire has acquired an almost mythical status among tenant-rights activists and affordable-housing advocates,” said Thomas P. Kerr of the Mobilehome Parks Report newsletter.

That status drew major funders to the Community Loan Fund, and in 2008 helped it launch a national nonprofit, ROC USA®, to take its strategy nationwide.

But New Hampshire remains the research-anddevelopment laboratory for manufactured-housing co-ops. The Community Loan Fund won national recognition for its Cooperative Home Loans, which are available only in resident-owned communities. And just this year Granite State College began offering college credits for residents who successfully complete ROCNH’s leadership training.

“TPCF likes to reinvest in the regions where our sponsors are located,” says Twin Pines President David Thompson. “We’re proud to be playing a part in giving residents co-op ownership of their parks in New Hampshire—and beyond.”

Hanover Co-op General Manager Terry Appleby thinks the investment in the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund by Twin Pines is a great example of cooperatives helping cooperatives. “Our money works in several ways for issues we value”, he says. “It provides us a return on our endowed funds that we use to make grants to local non-profits, as well as providing funds for new cooperative development.”

Learn more about the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund at www.communityloanfund.org.