The old Victorian home at 162 Cambridge St. doesn’t stand out at first glance. The screened-in porch is decked with a few old chairs, a garden takes the place of a front lawn and the garage is painted with a rainbow of colors — nothing out of place in the progressive Westcott Street neighborhood.

The only indication that this isn’t your average single-family home comes from a small sign on the front door, which reads “Bread and Roses Collective.”

Bread and Roses is home to seven roommates who don’t pay rent to a landlord; every member of the collective is a co-owner of the house. They buy all their food and cook together. They pool money to lower the cost of utilities. They share nearly everything: furniture, dishes and responsibilities.

And with their newly-built second house on Westcott, just beyond the old home’s backyard, Bread and Roses is helping to share the idea of cooperative and collective living and throughout Syracuse.

Its members come from diverse backgrounds, but the best way to describe a collective is as a family, said Kanat Bolazar, a Bread and Roses member. They live in harmony despite their different religions, political views and income levels.

In fact, to preserve its nonprofit status, Bread and Roses has to have a certain number of low-income residents. A base rent of $350 covers everything, save for food and utilities, which usually add another $150 to rent each month. But that rent runs on a sliding scale, so those who make less money pay less.

“The food we buy together, eat together,” Bolazar said. “Who eats how much doesn’t matter, all the utilities are shared, everything is shared, all the decisions are made together.”

Members grow a lot of their own food in the home’s gardens, which take up the full front yard and a horse paddock turned extra-large backyard. Instead of grass, asparagus and leeks sprout from garden beds. What they don’t grow is bought almost exclusively from Syracuse Real Food Co-op.

The lifestyle isn’t for everyone, said James Green, a Bread and Roses member.

“Some people like living on their own, it’s simpler,” Green said. “I accept that, it’s not for everybody.”

Therefore, to live at Bread and Roses, potential roommates have to go through an application process first.

“New members don’t contact us and move in the next week,” Bolazar said. “It’s like a family or being in a relationship with so many people, you don’t want to be like, ‘OK, let’s go.’ You want to take your time, get to know the person, see if you are compatible.”

Before moving in, potential roommates visit the house a few times, learn what it means to live in a collective house and have an interview with all the house members. About half of applicants get accepted.

The interview process doesn’t make everyone instant friends, said Lindsay Speer, a Bread and Roses member. Some run into conflicts. Others just don’t want to keep up with the work. And if members can’t work it out — or if they don’t give it a chance — they can move out.

Speer first moved into Bread and Roses in 2006 and decided to leave in 2010 — not because of conflict, but because she “had this erroneous idea that I had to grow up and get a real apartment.”

Just a few years later, Speer knew she needed to come back.

“I missed being able to walk down to the kitchen and have a conversation,” Speer said. “I was going through a rough time in my life and they welcomed me back with open arms.”

That feeling of family and acceptance is what inspired its founders to create a collective.

Fifteen years ago, a landlord owned the Cambridge home and rented it to four roommates. But the roommates felt there just wasn’t a sense of community in the house — so they brought in more people.

With more people in the house, the home became more cooperative, Bolazar said. Those roommates started sharing food, cooking together and splitting maintenance jobs.

“At some point they were like, ‘This is kind of like a collective, but at the same time the owner has the right to veto decisions because he owns the building,’” Bolazar said. “You don’t really have a voice if your voice can be vetoed.”

So they decided to make it official and turn the home into a collective. It took three years to draw up Bread and Roses’ legal framework and find a way to buy the home. After all, not everybody would allow a new group with no leader to get a mortgage for a house, Bolazar said.

That’s where cooperation came in.

Bread and Roses fits into a larger framework of Syracuse cooperatives — a cooperative commonwealth that also includes the Syracuse Real Food Co-op, Bitternut Homestead Urban Collective and Cooperative Federal Credit Union. Partnership between cooperatives is one of the National Cooperative Business Association’s principles, said Frank Raymond Cetera, Cooperative Federal’s board president.

As a business adviser at Onondaga Community College, Cetera works with startup and existing cooperatives. He has hands-on experience to back that up: in 2010 Cetera founded the Bitternut collective.

“It was a natural fit for me to want to have the experience and also have the know-how to develop another collective house in Syracuse,” Cetera said. “So it’s a really good experience to be able to take it from ground zero and work with it and experience all the challenges and all the positives that come out of it.”

Cetera purchased Bitternut’s home on the Near Westside as a dollar home — a house that the government acquires after a foreclosure and sells for a dollar. After sitting vacant for four or five years, the house’s exterior was vandalized, its windows were broken out and all of its electrical and plumbing were gone.

It took years to get the house in livable condition, and Cetera did a lot of that work while living at Bread and Roses. Once he moved in, he started recruiting roommates, and today they’re still continuing to work on renovations.

That desire for progress is one of the reasons Sam Eschenbrenner said he loves collective living. He works at Cooperative Federal and lives at Bread and Roses, and loves the sense of cooperation between the two.

“We’re part of a small but very active progressive community,” Eschenbrenner said.

But that small community has room to grow.

“Syracuse is still behind the curve in terms of infiltration of cooperatives,” Cetera said. “But we support the other cooperatives, first of all.”

After all, it was the fellow co-op Cooperative Federal Credit Union that got Bread and Roses off the ground 15 years ago and allowed it to start a second home.

Today, Bread and Roses still has a mortgage to pay off. But there’s no problem paying the bills, Bolazar said. It can house up to nine roommates, but five or six roommates have to be able to pay all of Bread and Roses’ bills. Whatever’s left over just pays the mortgage off faster.

There’s still another mortgage to pay off and a lot of revamping to do, but this new home is worth it, Bolazar said — it allows Bread and Roses provide even more low-income housing.

As renovation of the second house creeps along, a tree swing facing away from the old Cambridge house overlooks an unfinished brick path, a pile of stones ready to be stacked into a terrace and the new home on Westcott.

It’s a perfect view of what’s to come.

Published on October 31, 2016 at 9:20 pm

Contact Kathryn: [email protected] | @kathrynkrawczyk