Juliette Des Rosiers ’26
Editor-In-Chief
On the off chance you find yourself in Austin, Texas, and you decide to take a stroll through the twenty-something-infested West Campus neighborhood, a breezy walk down 21st St. reveals a vital contribution to the University of Texas’s student life: housing cooperatives.
In just a couple blocks, you can spot seven of the 16 student housing co-operatives in West Campus. The other nine are also all within a few blocks from this route. The co-ops are home to anywhere from 17 to 122 residents, and each has a robust history, from name changes to housefires to celebrity performances.
Over the past two summers, living in the Taos and Pearl Street Co-ops revealed to me that communal living is not the inconvenience it can feel like in college dorms. Instead, communal living is an opportunity to empower fellow students, regardless of your relationship with them, to achieve the goal of finding shared joy.
The co-ops are a simple concept: provide students with low-cost housing that includes rent, utilities, and meals, and in exchange, ask that they share upkeep duties among themselves. Students made decisions through a house vote during biweekly meetings, and house-elected officers organized responsibilities such as labor, events, food, and membership.
The people build a co-op community. Upon entering any cooperative house, you feel taken care of and immediately recognize that co-opers share an inherent value of forming connections. The people provide everything in the house, from cooking meals, cleaning common spaces, and throwing parties. You meet friends while chopping onions or weeding the garden and strengthen these bonds during random hallway chats or impromptu kitchen raves.
Conversations are fun but also engaging, pushing people to grow beyond the status quo both in their humor and intellect. One day, you may walk into the living room to see a group watching videos of competitive pig racing while someone cleans out the community fridge. Another day, people are helping each other with homework while someone in the kitchen makes lemonade to sell at the mutual aid art market the house is hosting that evening. Co-ops are a space that redefines what “living” can look like and exemplifies what it means to build a home collectively.
Though the non-profits that formally own the houses provide support for operations, having peer officers was incredibly empowering and efficient. It set the expectation that members looked to their housemates for assistance and collaborated to solve house problems instead of jumping to those who would police or discipline them. This was incredibly important when, say, a vent exploded, or dinner cooks were simply missing an ingredient for a meal. Calling on our peers for help fostered patience and compassion since someone was not waiting on an ambiguous entity (read: office) to answer their need, but a fellow full-time student worker with whom they bump elbows at the dinner table or share a bathroom.
That is not to say, however, that this cooperation is unconditional. One misconception about the co-ops, probably due to their unique structure, is that we live in kumbaya-esque harmony. Quite contrary to this, there were almost weekly spats. Like any group of 65 young adults, some people didn’t like each other, work together, or even speak to each other. This dislike, however, did not prevent them from living respectfully and cooperatively together.
Pearl Street Co-op does not shy away from holding friends accountable. I could give someone a “red card” for missing their labor or send a message in the #shame channel of our Discord about leaving the kitchen a mess and still share a nice, cold [redacted] or freshly rolled [redacted] at our weekly Bougie Tuesday festivities on the balcony. Co-opers understand that accountability is necessary for maintaining a community that relies on each other for their home, thus embracing healthy, respectful confrontation.
At a particularly tense house meeting, I witnessed multiple people argue over whether to remove the house ban on a former friend of the house. The discussion was respectful but obviously emotionally turbulent, and the result of the house vote did not satisfy all parties. However, the co-opers involved did not let this disagreement prevent them from cheering each other on at the house Fight Night or throwing the other in the pool in congratulations for a well-cooked meal. Ultimately, their compassion towards each other as human beings and understanding of shared cooperative values outweighed differences.
These cooperative values also act as a safety net during times of need. For instance, when someone sent a message in Discord requesting a ride, whether it be to the airport or hospital, anyone in the house would step up. Co-opers shared personal resources, such as painkillers, clothes, or makeup, to ensure their neighbor felt secure and cared for.
A crucial moment that comes to mind is when a low-income member needed monetary assistance for vet fees. When his cat got mysteriously sick, co-opers from the entire Austin community rallied together to cover almost 75 percent of the vet bill. Additionally, Pearl Street members cleaned his room while he was gone, made a card, and bought him pet supplies to help with the cat’s recovery. When living structures reinforce compassion and cooperation, residents’ actions prioritize these values beyond the house responsibilities tasked to them. People care for people, regardless of whether they are asked to.
Although not self-governing entities, Scripps dorms are not too far removed from Austin co-ops. We also have student living facilities supported by student leadership, and Scripps students, in my experience, share many similar values with co-opers. Therefore, I believe we can collectively make dorm life feel less impersonal. It is imperative to embrace opportunities to get to know other dorm residents. Introduce yourself to your neighbors and invite them over. Advertise open kickbacks in the dorm group chat. Attend RC and CC-sponsored events. Share your love for cuisine by proposing a hallway community cook and meal. Don’t shy away from respectfully and compassionately holding peers accountable or reinforcing boundaries, even when confrontation is uncomfortable. Incorporating cooperative habits into our communal living structures would benefit the entire dorm as well as strengthen individual sense of self.
Multiple times throughout the summers, I marveled to myself, “This is how human beings are meant to live.” Living in a community and dedicating time to caring for each other felt so natural. After living alone, I realized how much easier it was to find the motivation to clean and cook when I knew my housemates would benefit as well as myself. Co-opers embrace the house’s quirks, such as the dented kitchen pots, half-broken oven, and extra bedframes scattered around. Arguably, they advertise it, proudly shouting, “Pearl is Shit, Shit is Pearl,” at most social functions.
Co-opers are fearless in exercising love and acceptance. They are unapologetic in their ideals and open to reconnecting with humanity. Pearl Street Co-op feels like one of the safest places in the world because members make it so. While the broader social order promotes individualistic actions, it is essential to remember that we should strive to embrace our neighbors and build community resilience in the places we call home.
Photo Courtesy: Juliette Des Rosiers ’26
