Formed in 2008 in New Hampshire, ROC USA grew out of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, one of the earliest existing Community Development Financial Institutions, which aim to use market tools to support underprivileged communities. ROC USA has since created cooperatives in twenty-one states, with its successes largely clustered in the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, and, increasingly, in Minnesota.

On a recent winter morning, I drove south from Minneapolis to meet Bev Adrian at Woodlawn, the resident-owned community where she’s now president. The sun was shining on the pickup trucks, the vinyl-siding-clad homes, and the park’s communal garden beds. Adrian — small-framed, abundantly energetic — hustled me into her home, which was full of Bob Dylan posters, cookbooks, and political manifestos.

Woodlawn voted to become a cooperative in March 2020, right at the outset of the pandemic. Indoor gatherings weren’t allowed, so the residents — “ecstatic” to vote yes, says Adrian — grabbed chairs and posted up in a central patch of Woodlawn they redubbed Park Square. Through its local subsidiary, ROC USA ran its traditional playbook for Woodlawn, which means helping the residents with technical assistance on how to form a cooperative and navigate the purchasing process.

ROC USA and its subsidiaries can also lend directly to cooperatives. The cost of a park varies depending on its size and location; for the last seven years, the average sale price for a ROC USA community has been $4.15 million. The ROC USA loans are repaid, with often better-than-market interest rates, thanks to the organization’s savvy use of state subsidies. On average, ROC USA residents pay $417 a month to service these loans. Residents also pay a one-time fee, usually just a few hundred dollars, to join the cooperative. If they leave, they’re refunded the money.

Before Woodlawn became a cooperative, Adrian used to regularly see folks drive in and out in Escalades and other conspicuous luxury vehicles — potential buyers, she was sure. To this day, she says, she gets solicited weekly, via postcards and calls: “‘Are you the owner of the park? Are you interested in selling?’” Despite Woodlawn’s status as a cooperative, private investors haven’t given up, Adrian says: “They’re just out there .”

As a nonprofit, Woodlawn is eligible for a “boatload” of state grants, Adrian says, and so Woodlawn has money and plans: to revitalize a private well for drinking water; to replace a load of sewer lines; to properly fix up the park’s rental units. “Who gets to spend millions?” Adrian says, laughing, incredulous at her good fortune. “It’s like winning the lottery.”

Adrian is part of an informal network of activist resident-owned community presidents fighting to increase the number of cooperatives in the state. That includes Natividad Seefeld, who helped turn her own community — the eighty-eight-home Park Plaza in nearby Fridley, Minnesota — into a cooperative in 2011. Since then, Seefeld has become a nationally recognized crusader for the resident-owned community model.

Seefeld is a garrulous great-grandmother with inexhaustible zeal. When I visit her in Park Plaza, she peppers her monologues with phrases like “That is serious straight-up bullshit” and “I would kill a bitch.”

As the chair of the ROC Association’s Policy and Advocacy Committee, she was instrumental in helping push through the PRICE Act, which will provide hundreds of millions in federal funding for manufactured housing. She’s become adept at luring high-profile politicians like Democratic Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison to Park Plaza. She’s also testified at State Capitol hearings for years; she just has to figure out scheduling ahead of time, so she can get time off her full-time job at a General Mills warehouse.

At those hearings, Seefeld regularly comes face to face with Mark Brunner, president of the Manufactured and Modular Home Association of Minnesota, the state’s main lobbying group for private owners of manufactured housing parks. According to advocates for manufactured housing residents, in recent years the lobbying group has successfully pushed back against proposed rent-control ordinances.

“He gets up there and he will straight up lie,” Seefeld says. “I always want to stand up and say, ‘That makes no sense!’ I have to sit there and calm myself down,” she says with a laugh. “He just fully despises me. I don’t know why. Some people are just that way.”

Before I leave Park Plaza, I sit in on a board meeting in the community center, which doubles as Park Plaza’s storm shelter. Built a few years back to replace an inadequate bunker, it’s dotted with primary-color children’s handprints and flags representing residents from Afghanistan, Italy, and Mexico.

The first order of business is the installation of solar panels on a resident’s roof. Another family’s home desperately needs new doors. Some of the community’s trees need shots to protect them from invasive emerald ash borer beetles. Again and again, residents ask the same fundamental question: How are we going to pay for this? And again and again, they find a make-do solution.

Before we wrap up, Seefeld reports that a resident named Suad has asked Seefeld if he can form a cleanup committee. Everyone is pleasantly shocked, but also unsure how to proceed: No one has ever actually volunteered to start a committee before. They decide they’ll figure out the details later.