North Four Corners News ♦ June 2025

Maryland Housing Cooperative Not Quite As Successful As Planned

By Jacquie Bokow

A June 2003 article in the Northwood News described “Maryland’s only successful housing cooperative.”  But that story didn’t quite explain what happened.

A chance remark by Seymor (“Sy”) Kant led me to interview him about what he remembered.  Kant, 97 (or “97-and-two-thirds,” as he says), is one of the original members of that cooperative and still lives in the home on Cavalier Court that is one of the 44 brick houses built by Northwood Park Housing, Inc.

Many of the people in the cooperative were from New York, he explained, where they lived in cooperative apartment houses.  Usually cooperatives also include communal spaces and clubs for the residents.  The original vision was for about fifty families to be involved and for one of the houses to be a community club house; a family would, essentially, rent their home, which would belong to the cooperative.

The plan was to have a Federal Housing Administration 100% mortgage.  The FHA said each house had to have seven rooms; each room would cost $1,900, for a total house price of $13,300.  You could have additions made to the original house plan as long as you paid however much those additions raised the cost above $13K.

With an FHA mortgage, there was no down payment if the house could be built at that $13,300 price.  There were two designs, called A and B, which sold for that price.  House A came with a full basement but no den; House B had a den but no finished basement or basement room (a finished basement room was considered the seventh room).  You could add a full basement to a B house, but it cost $1,000 more and wouldn’t be covered by the mortgage.  The builders tried to put As in wherever they could, but only half the lots would fit As as the lots were either too small or too hilly.  The original plan called for 46 homes, but only 44 could be squeezed in.

Once the builder was ready to begin, people in the cooperative chose which home they wanted by the order they had joined.  Sy and his wife Dorothy were #24.  The original 44 homes included a club house at Belton and Cavalier, but there weren’t enough members who wanted to (or were able to) pay 1/43 the price of an additional house.

Brick homes cost more — that was a big deal at the time, said Kant — but the co-op members felt it was important to use brick even though it added $1K to the cost.  The group insisted on brick homes because they wanted better-than-average quality.

Bathrooms were tiled in black-and-white, unless you paid more for color.  Houses could be expanded in 14-inch increments; each cost an additional $750.

The one thing that was free was choosing the color paint for the walls; each room could be a different color if you wanted.  A dishwasher was an option that cost extra.  There was no clothes dryer, but you could pay $10 for a dryer outlet to be installed.

But costs shot up.  The builders couldn’t meet the $13,300 FHA price; $16,500 was the cheapest home they could build.  With the extras they added, the Kants’ house cost $18,000, so they needed to come up with about $5,000 down in cash.  FHA’s preferred interest rate for the co-op was 4.5%, but when FHA reduced its rate for everyone to 4.25%, there was no advantage to having a cooperative.  Without the financial advantage and without a community club house, the board of directors decided having a cooperative rental agreement was no longer a good idea.  So they decided to sell the houses to each cooperative member.

Project planning started in 1948; building finally began in 1954.  Families began to move in early in 1955.  The homes closer to Lockridge Drive were finished first.

The homes had four doors.  The living room door had no outside lock, so the front, dining room, and back door all had the same key — two keys for each lock — but owners only received five.  Because of the original plan of the cooperative owning all the homes, the co-op kept one as an access key to every home.

When the cooperative was dissolved, the board’s last action was to return that extra key to each homeowner and refund the several hundred dollars left in the bank account to the 44 homeowners; Sy remembers they each got an envelope containing $17.

The co-op had an Architectural Control Committee; its purpose was to keep all the houses the same as long as they were part of the cooperative (i.e., rentals).  Homeowners would have to apply to the committee for any change to the outside of their houses.  Sy said he “has been serving as committee chair for 60+ years and has done nothing on it” since there is no longer a cooperative requiring consistency of appearance.  He and a neighbor were picked to be on the committee because they were the youngest; both still live in their “cooperative” homes on Cavalier Drive.  Once there was no cooperative, there was no use for the committee, but it’s still mentioned in all the deeds.

[Bokow grew up in this neighborhood and has lived in one of the cooperative homes — an A — on Cavalier Drive for 25 years.  This article was truncated in the printed version.]   ■

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