A Local Community Needs Your Help To Survive

The "Establishment" in San Luis Obispo, California is getting organized to save itself from being sold to profit-seekers.

There are those who have lived in the house who, once they leave, choose to do a little something special. With all of their furniture, clothing, and decorations of life removed from their rooms, leaving a bare hardwood echo chamber, a kind of sacrament is carried out inside it. One woman chose to have an ice cream tasting party on the floor. Another invited over the “homies,” and we all took turns trying to think up what food dish was best embodied by each person, laughing into the night. Others choose to leave quietly, off to the next endeavor with a casual wave. Still others are asked to leave ignominiously. You get a little bit of everything in this community. And now, the community is facing an existential threat.

The Establishment, “The Stab” for short, or sometimes just “the house,” has been evolving into what it is today since about 1968 when it served as a de facto Cal Poly architecture student house. The big green house, located at 1703 Santa Barbara Avenue in San Luis Obispo, has nineteen bedrooms, four bathrooms, four fridges, two stoves, and a stalwart coterie of characters who breathe life into its old walls. If you hop on by, expect to see someone watering the garden, a plethora of bikes, people reading in the den, lively conversations in the kitchen, and ramshackle collages showcasing denizens of old.

The house provides an affordable, high-density community for people of all walks of life, something that San Luis Obispo, and California more broadly, are in desperate need of. The current owners have decided to sell the house on the open market for an asking price of $2.2 million, thus putting the community at risk of dissolution. Former tenants and current friends and allies of the community are mounting an effort to collectively purchase the house. If they succeed, this will ensure the continuation of the ethos and character of the intentional community. If they fail, this could be yet another story of dismal property investors running roughshod over an established community in their profit-seeking attempt to gentrify a neighborhood by refurbishing a home into a bed and breakfast that caters only to bourgeois tourists.

I’ve gotten to know The Establishment community over the past two years. My partner is a longtime dweller. What struck me most about the community is that long-ago tenants, affectionately referred to as “Stabbies,” remain ancillary friends or even central figures in its culture decades after their tenure with the house is through. What’s even more notable – and that sadly speaks to the rending our larger society has gone through – is that the community’s makeup is so various. Tech bros live alongside woo-woo astrologists. Scrappy handymen meet put-together professors. Curmudgeonly old men brush shoulders with woke, genderqueer students, each of them softening the other in their rutted ways. This comingling of strange bedfellows provides – and I can say this from experience having lived in a low-income apartment complex in a bad part of Medford, Oregon while I was going to school, thus placing me in a vastly different milieu from the young college liberals – a much more personally valuable and socially useful learning experience than any halls of an academy could ever afford on its own. If we want a more cohesive society with broadly shared civic values, communities such as The Establishment are essential.

“It’s changed my life, and I want other people to have that same opportunity,” said Jenn Yost, a former “Stabbie” and the current leader of the community effort to purchase the building. Although, those words may have been said by any number of others whose lives have been touched by the house. I have heard the same sentiment expressed by nearly everyone who I have met in the larger community.

The Establishment is a hub of neighborly activity. Stan the Avocado Man from down the street brings over boxes of extra avocados. Phyllis drops off her special culinary experiments with little notes explaining the ingredients. Monday Movie Nights happen every week out on the street beside the house, open to whoever passes by. The house hosts soirees with likely attenders ranging from local luminaries such as old-timers Eric Greening and Mark “Gizmo” Grayson to young college students and no-name street kids. People on cross-country bike tours looking for warm showers are welcome to stay the night.

A few years ago, a local houseless man, John, living out of his car, his health declining, was invited in by the community. He spent some of his last days there, with the community doing what they could to assist him with his day-to-day tasks.

The house has also served, not coincidentally, as an incubator for local businesses and influential community events. From Sam DeNicola’s Bread Bike bakery, to “Gizmo” leading the Thursday night Bike Happening, to the house zine The Fortnightly-ish, to an annual underground bike ride (shhh, cool kids only), you can find the larger community’s cast of familiar faces out and about, making their city a more vibrant place. 

Hundreds of people have lived at The Establishment and thousands more have been touched by its presence. All of its tenants, whether they like this notion or not, are forever “Stabbies.” It is now time for the community to stand in solidarity and protect itself. Acting individually is not enough. It is only through communities exerting collective power and making their demands known that their interests can be secured.

The Establishment must be sold to the group that is organized specifically to preserve the function and character of the current community.

Collective ownership of the house is not only our best shot at continuing the community, it is a model of housing that is inherently much more democratic and equitable for the stakeholders. A single property owner, no matter how convinced you are of their good-heartedness, holds far too much power over tenants and is able to monopolize the windfalls from a property. So long as housing is not treated as a human right but is instead subject to the pressures of capitalism, and so long as renters are disempowered, individuated, and apolitical, tenants will be unequal. They will be giving over their livelihoods to property owners while acquiring little to no wealth for themselves. Shared ownership of housing spreads the wealth around and ensures that power does not reside in any one person.

We need your help to make this happen for the Establishment.

We are looking for more people to help fund the collectivized purchasing of the house. If you’d like to know how else you can get involved, you can visit the house’s website at theestablishmentslo.com. Or just stop on by!

Given the utter inability of our capitalist government, our liberal nonprofits, and our “best and brightest” billionaire oligarchs who self-style themselves as our final saviors to substantively address the exigencies of the climate crisis, our only hope of sustaining any semblance of organized human society is to create and foster independent, collectivized communities that operate outside of the existing structures which are built on environmental extraction, exploitation of workers, and domination of other peoples.

Given the uprooting of our social bonds and the staggering enforced inequalities perpetuated by the worst of corporate capitalism, independent communities operating under a philosophy of mutual aid are more important than ever.

Knowing your neighbors and collectivizing resources will be far more important to our survival than fighting tooth and nail over property lines. As resource scarcity and economic precarity get worse, the kind of social cohesion that is offered by communities such as The Establishment can serve as a bulwark against social breakdown. Hardship and social tension need not lead inexorably towards catastrophe. If we instead choose to build systems that are founded, not on greed and competition, but instead on solidarity, cooperation, and democracy, we may just yet have a fighting chance.

We need your help in this fight. Human solidarity, demonstrations of collective power, and mutual aid are the only ways we can fight back. Nobody is coming to save us except for ourselves. Together we can carry on a model of community living that stands in stark contrast to our individualized and disempowered society and culture.

Do not put your faith in the myth of kind landlords. Put your faith in collective organizing. Solidarity now, solidarity forever.