Connection, conversation & celebration!
On a sunny day this fall, homeowners at Iron Wheel Cooperative celebrated in style after several months of hard work to become New Hampshire’s 155th resident-owned community.
Donna the other residents successfully purchased their community after receiving a 60-day notice that the private owner planned to sell the land and infrastructure under their homes to an out-of-state investment company.
New Hampshire was the first state in the nation to pass the “opportunity to purchase” law in 1983. When a private owner of a manufactured-home community decides to sell the community, the residents have 60 days to come up with a matching offer.
The board, all volunteers, worked together with residents and the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund’s ROC-NH coaches to quickly form a cooperative and make their offer.
Donna has lived at Iron Wheel for a year and a half and said the community is unique.
“I love where I live,” she said. “There’s space between the homes.”
Anne Smith, secretary of the board, agreed with Donna about Iron Wheel.
“It’s nice and quiet,” she said, adding that a resident had once described it as “like a Norman Rockwell painting.”
Resident-owned communities are corporations whose members — the homeowners — own and operate their community as a not-for-profit, with coaching from ROC-NH. Each home is individually owned, while the land and infrastructure under the homes is owned by the co-op.
Residents of Iron Wheel now have control over monthly lot fees, rules, infrastructure investments, and the long-term affordability of the community.
“This park will never be for sale again,” Anne said.
Resident-owned communities with available space for new homes, like Iron Wheel Cooperative, can also receive financing and technical support from the Community Loan Fund to add and sell homes on their vacant lots. Infill increases the community’s income from monthly lot fees that can be put toward community improvements and financial sustainability.
Over the last five years, the Community Loan Fund has helped ROCs set and sell more than 200 homes, adding much-needed affordable housing to the state’s housing supply and generating nearly $5M in income for these ROCs.
Two residents played music fit for dancing, board members cut into a lavender-frosted cake, and the community cheered as board president Donna Harkness snipped a giant purple ribbon. Donna and many of the other residents were wearing purple, the cooperative’s honorary color.
“It feels secure,” Donna said. “The biggest thing is the security of knowing what we have in store for us — if someone else had bought the park, who knows what would have happened.”
Iron Wheel Cooperative — made up of 81 homes and five vacant lots — is a 55+ community in Danville, a small, rural town in Rockingham County.