What is the Fishbowl? The Fishbowl is a house in Moab that has served as an affordable, community-oriented co-living space for the last 15 years, if not more. Several generations of locals have found affordable living space and community here, and it has long been a venue for community building and social events.
What are you trying to do? We’re forming a nonprofit to buy the house from the current owners and keep it as an affordable, community-oriented, and resident-controlled house forever. To do it, we need to raise $120,000 for a down payment, so we can secure a low enough mortgage to keep rents affordable for the foreseeable future.
What is a housing cooperative? A group of people who live together and democratically control the house they live in. Here, the house is owned by a nonprofit and governed by its residents. How it works has the full picture.
Who controls the house? House residents, as members of the nonprofit’s board. The board will also include several seats for long-term Moab residents and housing experts who don’t live in the house but support its values, in order to maintain continuity as housemates come and go.
Will anyone make money off this? No. No individuals will gain equity from ownership of the house, nor will any individual take on liability for the house, although the nonprofit itself can gain equity that could one day be leveraged to replicate this model with other houses.
How can I help? Lots of ways:
- Donate any amount toward our down payment.
- Pledge a community loan of $5,000+ if you have some cash to spare.
- Offer your skills or time, especially grant writing, or nonprofit and cooperative housing experience.
- Join our board, or just help spread the word.
See Support Us for the details.
What happens to my donation if you can’t buy the house? If for some reason we are unable to buy the house, we will donate these funds to Community Rebuilds. But we feel very confident in this project.
How do community loans work? You can support us with a loan of $5,000+. For now, we’re taking loan pledges, and we won’t ask for the money until we’re ready to make an offer. We’ll pay these loans back alongside our mortgage, and can offer rates similar to a CD, with higher rates for longer-term loans and lower rates for quicker payback times. To learn more, email us at hello@fishbowlcollective.org. Ask for Emily, our treasurer and board member.
Why don’t the current residents just buy the house? Collectively, we don’t have enough money for a large down payment. And even if we did, the Fishbowl is meant to be a stepping stone: it provides short-term housing, often to people who work in the community, sometimes seasonally, sometimes at nonprofits, generally lower income. Residents personally investing in the house would be at odds with that. If everyone bought in, they’d be committed to a 30-year mortgage, and it would be unlikely they could buy their own house someday. It would also get very complicated to transfer ownership between residents as people come and go, versus just signing a lease, and you’d end up paying mostly interest without really gaining equity in the house anyway.
Why doesn’t someone just buy the house and keep it as a rental for you? Short answer: it doesn’t make financial sense for most people, or for the residents. One of the primary reasons we decided to go with a nonprofit structure is that we wanted to divorce personal financial gain from residents’ housing, both its cost and its stability. If someone bought this house at today’s price, then once you add in the mortgage, property taxes, home insurance, and a buffer for repairs and property management, the rent per person would be a dramatic step up from what we pay now. Alternatively someone could rent it to us for less than the cost of the mortgage, but I’m not sure why they would unless they were really rich and really nice. It also has the potential to create instability. We don’t want to be in a situation where the buyer/landlord has to liquidate the house (like we are in now) for retirement, an emergency, or whatever personal reason, and then we all have to move out.
How do we pay for repairs or an unexpected expense (new roof, washing machine, hot water heater, etc)? Every homeowner faces this risk, and a nonprofit is no different. We’re budgeting for home insurance. The house will be inspected as part of the purchase process, so we’ll be made aware of any major problems and will negotiate them as part of the purchase (lower the price by the cost to fix it, or please fix it before we buy), which is standard. The financial plan starts with an emergency fund, and we build more into it each year, distributed across everyone’s rent, ramping up once rent is below fair market value. We could also get a line of credit against the equity the co-op has in the house, which is pretty standard for homeowners. Worst case, we fundraise and reach out to the community and the network of Fishbowl alumni.
Who’s behind this? We are Katie, Emily, Laura, Rose, Cali, Cami, Sam, and Jacob, current and former residents of the Fishbowl. Read our story.
What does FISHBOWL stand for? Friends In Shared Housing By Ourselves Without Losers. 😄