In a Seattle neighborhood of plain, buttoned-up houses, the Jolly Ranch is an oasis of wildness sheltering three ordinary people engaged in an extraordinary experiment—an urban commune. Their two houses nestle among a tangle of flowering currants, figs, apples, pears, peaches, plums and raspberries. Inside, the residents share money and meals, conversation and conflict. Their communal philosophy accommodates the practicalities of city life, and as in any functional family, they work hard to maintain their own as well as their group’s identity.
Marc Cote, Jon Dumont and Shawn Young are all 44 years old, have been friends for nearly 20 years and have lived at the Ranch since 1995. Cote and Dumont first met at the University of Maine. After Young transferred there from Tufts University, she began dating Dumont, who had, by then, dropped out of college. Young and Dumont met at the group home for adults with developmental disabilities where they both worked. Cote, Dumont and Young live together in the main house. For the Ranchers, trust in each other is key. Their shared liberal values were perhaps shaped in part by their roots in Maine. Cote and Dumont both grew up in large Catholic families; Cote is the youngest of seven and Dumont the oldest of four. Young moved to Maine after fleeing the “pre-med” crowd at Tufts and stayed several years. Cote, a wiry man whose beard and long hair are flecked with gray, often looks like he’s dressed for a hike. Dumont is tall and barrel-chested with a quiet demeanor and an affection for tie-dyed shirts. Young is the most outgoing of the three. Her thick, brown hair is streaked with silver, and she too dresses in the comfortable Northwest attire of someone who is often outdoors. And she loves pets. As a result, the Ranch has never been without animals. Currently, they have three cats.
What used to be the basement is now a community gathering area, the site of most cooking, dining, and lounging. The upper floor, accessed by way of a stepladder, often shelters a few more guests—a litter of kittens on loan from the Progressive Animal Welfare Society. Young and Dumont share one bedroom. “Couples don’t usually share bedrooms in communities, but we don’t care,” Dumont says. Cote has the other bedroom, and the kittens get the bathroom. The second house is mainly used by temporary members and guests. Its current tenant is Louis Alkiewicz, who joined the Ranch in June and plans to stay for a year. He moved to Seattle from Missouri, where he spent three years at East Wind, a 75-member community in the foothills of the Ozarks.
The garage is crammed full of boxes and tools, the detritus of seven years of home improvements. It also holds a 21-foot wooden boat—a replica of a turn-of-the-century, sailing Alpha Dory built by some of Young’s hippie friends. It hasn’t touched the water in at least two years and is now full of boxes. Upstairs there are three bedrooms, a completely rebuilt kitchen and bathroom, and a small office with one computer. They get along well with their neighbors, but a few years ago, a real estate agent showing houses in the area was confused about the situation at the Ranch. The group found out about it from a new neighbor. “They said, ‘you seem like nice people,’” Dumont says. “‘The realtor said you were a crack house.’”
The Jolly Ranchers began planning their community in college. They recall that they wanted a group that would feel like a family, where all decisions would be made by consensus. At that time, in 1992, they thought intentional communities were a 1970s phenomenon that had long since died away, so they started their planning from scratch. They asked 20 of their friends to fill out a questionnaire about what sort of “utopia” they would create and compiled the answers to see what they had in common. A sense of humor was one starting point. Dumont says they chose to call themselves the Jolly Ranchers because it made them laugh, and they wanted to avoid “the common ailment of choosing a name that sounds like a retirement village.”
Their original group had dwindled to seven by the spring of 1995 when they pooled their resources and bought the two houses in Seattle’s Central District for $138,000. Young and Cote had the best credit, so they became the legal owners of the house after getting married to get the home loan. Although the group officially disapproves of marriage—and Young and Dumont are still a couple—Young said she found a way to justify marrying Cote. “It’s okay for anyone,” she explains, “to get married for financial reasons.”
Now, nearly nine years later, their experiment in urban egalitarian living continues. In contrast to the self-sufficiency of many rural communes, the Jolly Ranchers depend on outside jobs for income and the grocery store for food. The Ranch has an organic garden and a plot at the local P-Patch, but members only grow about five percent of their food. However, their urban location allows them to do the kind of work they love. Young, Dumont and Cote are residential counselors at the Park View Group Home, a six-bedroom facility for adults with developmental disabilities. When their salaries are added up, the three make a little over $70,000 a year. “Living in community allows us to work at jobs we enjoy and that we believe make a positive contribution, rather than at careers that simply pay well,” Dumont says.
Sharing Begins at the Bank
Income sharing is, in economic terms, like a marriage. The Ranchers’ paychecks are deposited in a communal bank account at the Alaska Credit Union. Their mortgage payments come out of that account, along with other household bills. They share the cost of most things, including medical bills, food for the home, the communal car, books for the house library and the tools for home-construction projects. They have built-in unemployment insurance—if any member should lose his or her job, or get arrested at a peace rally, the bills will still get paid. Members can also take vacations on the communal account. Young and Dumont took a trip to Key West last year, and there are numerous Ranch backpacking trips during the summer. When the bank statement comes, the three go through it, line by line, to claim their personal expenses, figuring out, for example, who spent the $40 at the Canterbury Alehouse on the second Friday night in July. Restaurant dinners, movies, lattes and new clothes are deducted from each member’s $200 monthly stipend.
Temporary members cost-share rather than income-share, meaning they’re more like traditional roommates. They contribute to household expenses, bills and group dinners, but maintain their financial independence. The price of cost-sharing at the Ranch fluctuates from month to month, but it tends to stay within the $550-$650 range, which is about the cost of one month’s rent for a studio apartment in Seattle. Alkiewicz, the only resident of the second house, is still looking for a full-time job. When he was living at East Wind in Missouri, he was the general manager of the community nut butter business but so far, his experience has not helped him much in his job hunt. With only three members and a temporary resident, Cote says, the Ranch can’t realize the full potential of money sharing. Their goal is to work less at jobs off the Ranch and put more time into their home, volunteer work and socializing. They’ve achieved that to some degree: Dumont still works 40 hours a week at Park View, but Cote has cut back to 32 and, Young works only 30. Yet, to truly benefit from the economies of scale, they need more people.
Despite the potential economic benefits, Cote says, income sharing requires a leap of faith. “There are some people who think it’s ridiculous to even talk about,” Dumont says. “They think ‘I make $50,000 dollars and I’m not sharing it with anyone. How about that?’ We think that’s real common. If I’m making more than you, why would I give you any of it? I earned it. I got a college education, a master’s degree, or I’m a doctor. If you didn’t want to be a doctor, be happy with your barista job.” The most challenging aspect of money sharing is the concept that a barista’s time is worth as much as a doctor’s. “You do have to believe in the egalitarian principle that one hour of work for you equals one hour of my labor,” Cote says. “If you come with a nest egg, you get to keep that. We don’t want to see it. But while you’re here you need to believe that one hour of work is equal.”
The Ranchers use a point system to organize the housework, a variation of the one dreamed up by B.F. Skinner in his utopian-fantasy novel “Walden Two.” Fifteen minutes of work is worth one point, and the group has agreed the Ranch needs 72 points worth of chores done each week. When divided by four, that equals 18 points—or four and a half hours—per person, per week. What chores people do during that time is completely up to them. Cote says division of labor is not generally an issue. “If there’s implicit trust, then a lot of accounting work doesn’t need to be done.”
Sharing Meals and Philosophy
At around six o’clock on a recent evening, Cote and Dumont put away their power tools and cleaned wood dust off the dining room table to set it for dinner. The latest construction project is a new door for the common room. They had cut a hole in the side of the house, and now it’s possible to get up from dinner and go directly out to the north side of the garden. Sometime down the line, they plan to construct a mosaic walkway outside, made of broken plate pieces and leftover concrete. All building-improvement projects are completed in-house, so things have a way of getting stuck in transition. Young says when they first moved in, they thought the remodeling would be done quickly, but it’s been seven years and the ceiling in the living room is still bare sheetrock. Nevertheless, their house is neat and tidy.
A tie-dyed peace sign banner decorates the wall. On the refrigerator there are flyers for protests, and a couple of protest signs lean against the wall. One says, “Resist!” Another says, “Cut the shit.” When everyone is seated, the grilled garlic bread, cheese ravioli and salad Young prepared for dinner are passed around the table. Other communities might sing before meals, but the Ranchers aren’t big on ritual. They talk about their work over dinner, generally saving discussions about the business of living together for their weekly meetings. That’s when they work out the inevitable clashes of community living. Before they moved to Seattle, the would-be Ranchers had many discussions about the kind of community they wanted to build, but it wasn’t enough to hold the whole group together. Two members left because they didn’t want to share money. Another member, Tanya Fisk, was very excited about money sharing, but she didn’t have the energy for a lot of meetings. She says now that the atmosphere at the Ranch became too analytical for her. She felt like she was living in a laboratory. “There is a lot of interpersonal work when you start a community, to find differences and bring out similarities,” Fisk says. “We’d have meetings that would last six hours. I’d get really overwhelmed.”
For Fisk, the biggest problem in the meetings wasn’t the issues being discussed, but rather the method of discussion. “We didn’t have a language process in place,” Dumont says. “We were having house meetings that were hotter than hell, and people were yelling at each other… at one point we did get an outside facilitator, but it was too late.” Eventually, the Ranchers learned how to talk to each other, and meetings don’t take more than a couple hours a week now. After a few years of relative peace, the remaining members are able to see the tumultuous early years in a positive light. Young says she was forced to become more “psychologically accountable.” She says she recognizes when an issue is in her head, then she tries to avoid getting defensive or using manipulative language. If she does, she knows someone will point it out to her. “I think that we do what we do because it feels right,” Dumont says. “I have learned more in the last eight years than at any other point in my life. It has been difficult, sometimes very difficult, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
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