What determines success?

I was reflecting on my years in Austin, now the majority of my adult life, which made me think about La Reunion (or La Re, as its members affectionately call it), the housing co-op that I helped start, and the way things fortuitously came together to make it work. It was founded in 2013, and it has had its ups and downs, like any housing co-op, but it is still going. But it is interesting to think about what might or might not have happened if a few things had gone just a bit differently, and I believe that this holds lessons for thinking about life in general.

I will give some background so that the rest of this post will make sense. When I talk about housing co-ops in this context, I am referring to housing arrangements that are controlled democratically by their members, for lack of a better definition. I am not really talking about the kinds of co-ops that exist in New York City for instance that are somewhat similar to condominiums where individuals own their units. Even with my definition, co-ops can take many forms. Sometimes a group of people rent a house together while living intentionally, sharing meals together and perhaps uniting around a set of core values. In these cases, the lines between a co-op and a more informal group of intentional people sharing a house as roommates can become a bit blurred. In other cases, such as with La Re, there is a group equity model where the property is owned by a nonprofit that exists for the purpose of running the co-op. Austin has a non-profit called Community Housing Expansion of Austin, or CHEA, that manages La Reunion along with its sister co-op, named Sasona. CHEA actually leases its properties from another entity, called NASCO Properties, or NP. NP is something like a cooperative of cooperatives, holding properties on behalf of several non-profits around the country that run housing co-ops.

Back in 2011, a friend of mine, named McAllen, noticed that there were no housing co-ops on the east side of town and decided that he wanted to start one. I liked the idea of having more co-ops--in Austin, there were a lot of co-ops for college students but relatively few for people who were not students--so I eventually decided to join him. He had found an investor who was willing to help us finance the purchase of a property, and we had an obvious choice for a realtor, someone who had some experience with student co-ops in Austin.

At the same time that McAllen and I were trying to start a co-op, NP was actively looking to add a new co-op to their portfolio. One of their co-ops in Santa Cruz was no longer functioning well, and they decided that they needed to sell the property, so they wanted to buy another property to replace it. What was a loss for Santa Cruz could be a gain for another city, and Austin was on their list of cities where they would consider buying a property for a new co-op. But there was one condition. The new co-op would need to be part of the non-profit that already existed for Sasona, to avoid NP needing to work with two separate organizations in the same city. So the residents of Sasona would need to be willing to be involved with the new project.

And, at least at first, there were multiple perspectives from members of Sasona in terms of whether they wanted to get involved with a new project. Co-ops often go through phases where there are challenges. Sometimes there are inter-personal conflicts. Sometimes there are members who do not pay rent or do not do their share of the work to keep the house running. Sasona had just been through a difficult period, and now things were finally running better. So, although the members generally felt positive about expanding, there was also some apprehension that it could go badly and turn the clocks back to a time when the co-op was struggling. There was at least one member who was a strong proponent of starting a new co-op, and she made sure that the house discussed the question and came to a decision. Ultimately, Sasona decided to move forward and work with NP to start a second co-op.

McAllen and I then joined forces with some people from Sasona, along with some people who knew people from Sasona. This gave the project a boost in terms of engaging a larger group of people. Additionally, NP had a larger budget to work with than our original investor, making a larger project possible.

So why did La Re succeed? When asking such questions, it is important to remember that multiple factors are usually at play. Starting this kind of thing is not trivial, and a few of us put a fair amount of work into it, but, still, there were other things working to our advantage. Austin has several large student co-ops, and, while Sasona is not a student co-op, it was founded by people who were living in student co-ops and wanted to continue to live in some kind of co-op after they graduated. Sasona’s existence put Austin on the map as a strong location for NP to consider when expanding. Some of La Re’s founders also came from student co-ops. Even without these advantages in terms of existing infrastructure, things might have turned out quite differently absent any number of factors.

The situation with the Santa Cruz co-op was unfortunate. No one wants to see a community break down and ultimately fail. But it put NP in a position where they were looking to expand when they likely would not have otherwise done so at that time. So, had the Santa Cruz co-op not failed, La Re would likely not have formed the way it did. Ditto if Sasona had not had a member there who took it upon herself to see to it that the issue got a proper discussion there. In either case, NP would not have been involved in the project. It is hard to say would would have happened in that case. I would not necessarily say that the effort would have failed. McAllen and I originally had a different investor who we were working with. Maybe we would have found a property that we could make work and that would have fit within his budget, and a new co-op would have started, one smaller than the La Re that ultimately materialized.

All of this has implications when we consider why some projects succeed, sometimes spectacularly, while others have moderate success or ultimately fizzle out. It is a similar concept to what I discussed in my last post in terms of finding employment. Working towards a goal can pay off, and it is not wise to adopt a fatalistic attitude that the world is beyond our control and that nothing we do can make a difference. It is good to think about what we want to see in the world, then think about what we might be able to do to bring about the change that we want to see. In doing this, we position ourselves so that we are present and are able to act when synchronicities present themselves. At the same time, there are times when, at least for the present, we will not succeed at something for reasons that have nothing to do with us, or we will not have the kind of success that we hoped for. So it is not a good idea to beat ourselves up if we are unable to accomplish a thing that we wanted to accomplish, or to assume that we failed because we didn’t work hard enough or didn’t do the right thing. And, although this goes without saying, we should also be very careful about making this assumption regarding other people. And, even if we made decisions that contributed to our not accomplishing something, we are all works in progress. None of us are perfect, and we can reflect on our decisions and their consequences and take any mistakes as opportunities to learn.