Senior Cooperative Housing - YouTube

We were looking at townhomes and then some friends

suggested that we come here to an open house. And we both came thinking,

"Yes,"

we'll go, but we know that this is not for us."

So we just sat at the open house and heard all of the discussions of

what a coop is and walked around and saw units and so on, and

went home and didn't say anything when we went home.

The next morning we both admitted to each other, "This sounds like it would be

a good thing!"

We had for a number of years spent the winters in Arizona,

and that was kind of a fun

community.

And I saw that there was going to be some of that same lifestyle in the

cooperative and that was attractive to us.

You get to a time in your life when you know

you may want to do something else, I mean,

taking care of the yard, and shoveling the snow and all these things, and I think it

actually happened to me one day

after I finished mowing the yard.

And I had this sense that I didn't want to mow the yard anymore. And we didn't want to go into a condominium

because we would literally take all of the assets, or the money, from the sale of our home and give it back to someone

else.

And that's when we noticed in the paper that Realife had put an ad in there

saying they were in the process

of building on this site. And they invited us down to one of the

Realife properties in Bloomington - took us down there on the bus,

gave us lunch and let us walk through

the building and talk to some of the residents. We were literally ready to buy

when we got done, I mean if we could have signed some papers on the bus coming

back, we would have done it.

It was just absolutely everything we wanted, and,

it ends up obviously being more.

We have

many amenities in the building: beautiful library, a big party room,

lots of social activities,

and again,

no maintenance - no outside maintenance. Just keeping up your own home.

We have beautiful gardens - you just sign up for it and

go to town. We have a workshop for men and women, it's not just for men,

it does have all the power tools in it, but it's a great place to

lay out a quilt pattern because you have that wide open space, where you might not have that

in your home,

where you just have a kitchen counter or table that you set up.

I've personally worked with people where it has taken them maybe two or three years,

they've gotten on the waitlist, it has taken them a while, finally they made the decision to put

the house on the market and moved in.

And then they'll come and say, "I don't know why I didn't do this ten years ago."

I don't have to worry about the upkeep of my home.

I don't have to worry about cutting the grass.

I don't have to worry about

having the driveway plowed.

I don't have to worry about a leaky faucet,

a toilet that doesn't stop running.

My worries are just over, here.

When i'm giving a tour,

I try to tell the people about our lifestyle,

what we offer here:

our catered dinners,

and I tell them how wonderful the people are.

And we have got a real nice group of

people living at Applewood.

And I just tell them, "You'd enjoy it! You'd love it here."

I

love to travel,

and I've traveled a great deal.

I don't have to give Applewood a thought.

It's all taken care of for me.

My mail can be brought in,

they check my apartment to make sure that there is not a leaky faucet or

water running,

I'm just worry-free.

It is a lifestyle

because we do -

we go out together, we have dinners together out in

restaurants,

we have dinners here, and we have

a lot of bicycles downstairs, they bikeride together.

They walk around, we have a pond right outside our door, and we walk around the pond

every day.

It's a lifestyle.

A healthy lifestyle.

I can honestly say I feel like I'm in my own home,

on a street,

in a town.

I feel just as much

privacy

here as I did in our own home.

And people are so respectful

of that.

We are all owners.

Well, that gives such a different perspective.

We're not looking and saying, "Oh, we're just lining their pockets by being

conservative."

Here we're helping each other

and the whole building belongs to us.

So,

if something's awry someplace

it's in our, to our benefit

to have that remedied or

or pitch in, in whatever way we can.

So we have a board here,

and they've been elected by the

members who live here,

and they live here.

And that makes quite a difference.

I took costs for maintenance and

all of this and looked at that, and started just

comparing that with what it was costing to live in our home. Then we began to see.

So I compared those

with living here and it was really apples to apples.

One of the things that seems to be

popular these days is trying to keep people in their own homes

as long as possible, and oftentimes that can be isolating.

People just don't have neighbors who are there,

they don't have family around,

whereas if you're living together in a cooperative setting,

you do have like-family around. Generally,

... what i've seen in the cooperative where we live is that people

cooperate

in terms of being able to serve the group

in ways that are of interest to them

and ways where they have expertise.

And it just all seems to come together very nicely. One of the nice things is that

there is a monthly fee, and this monthly fee includes many things.

It includes the mortgage, it includes the interest being paid on the mortgage for

the building, it includes many of the services that you'll receive, it includes

maintenance of the

facility, it includes some kinds of administration. So your monthly fee

includes all of those things,

and so you end up

not having to

have a lot of bills at the end of the month.

It's good to have a known kind of fee that you pay,

and you don't have to worry about

some huge increase.

And you know we make decisions about that

in the long run

we're putting aside money for

for things that we may need,

need to replace as the building ages.

That sort of thing. And so we're planning and anticipating for all of those sorts of

things,

which I think is a

real advantage of cooperative living.

Some of the best things I found out about living in a cooperative is the

community spirit,

the involvement of people

and the people here were very friendly, very welcoming, very wonderful. I'm a

single lady and

I think the amenities here are just absolutely perfect for me.

I feel very very safe living here,

it's

affordable

for a single person to live here and it's

it's really a wonderful place to be.

And it's really a wonderful safe,

warm

feeling community and you do not feel alone.

There's always somebody there.

We missed the people back here. I mean, we got so involved in the building we'd be, I'd tell

people we have more friends now than we've ever had in our life.

I mean, really good friends.

And so we were gone for maybe a couple of weeks and

looked at each other, "Are you ready to go home? Yeah!"

And you know we missed the people back here and people said, "Oh, did you miss your family?"

And I said yeah, but we miss the people back here in our building even more. And I think maybe we

went one more winter and we haven't gone away in the wintertime ever since. And that's very common

for a lot of people. It's

so easy to stay here because you've got everything you want here.

It's gotta be a healthful thing and, you know,

that's just one of the things. It's much healthier to live here because of

the companionship that you have.

What we really

treasure the most is

being in our own home

but

having a big room that we could have guests in. It's just a pleasure to

walk into such a beautiful place.

But I think being able to be on the lake,

have this

patio out here to enjoy and welcome our guests to, it's just a

pleasure to walk into such a beautiful place.

In many cases you read about where people when they get retired, they wonder what

they're going to do with the rest of their lives.

And I think

a number of people probably

wait too long

to live in a senior cooperative

and miss some of the real benefits of the social life.

Had I known about this lifestyle,

we might have done it

six, eight, ten years sooner.

It gives you a sense of community,

a sense of ownership,

a sense of opportunity and

freedom to not be tied to the kinds of responsibilities you are tied to with

private ownership of your own home.

The sense of

support

in a setting where

you can be who you are, and you can

cooperate, you can

have friends, you can have

coffee, you can do what you want. Plus, you know, the economic advantage to being

in a cooperative.

Well, I think the ideal candidate is anybody

who wants to live a less cluttered lifestyle

than they probably do in a house. And I think people who are interested in a

form of living

which is financially secure,

they have an ownership in the

uh... cooperative which is extremely significant.

But at the same time they can live independently in that

unit if they want to, or they can be as gregarious as they want to be

with other people.

And the opportunities for

working and and just living with other people are multiple. I think probably

every cooperative has its own set of

things that it can do or that it offers people.

But, you don't have to be a part of anything if you don't want to be. You can be

totally independent,

you don't have to show up at the coffee hour, you don't have to show up at the potluck, you

don't have to show up this or that.

And still you can be a part of the group.

A part and enjoy the

the benefits

of community, that is a rather special community of people who are

they're like-minded and they are

of similar age.

I recommend the lifestyle. I really do.