Wow, it's mid-August already! We hope your summer has been less "eventful" than ours. Read on for what we've been up to and how you can get involved.

New openings

As we move towards incorporation, we've been gradually changing how we recruit new members. Our current priority is to find new members with skills relevant to managing collective housing, and who could see themselves staying for at least several years. We're hoping that creating this mailing list and hosting more events will give people opportunities to meet us and learn about our lifestyle before committing to an interview.

We currently expect to have 2 rooms open from September, and another 1 to 2 rooms starting later in the year. We've updated our website with a new "Housing" page where you can always find the most up-to-date info on what's available and what we're looking for:

Housing

Come live at one of MALT’s houses!

MALTMALT Community

Please feel free to forward our housing page, or this email, to a friend or to another mailing list. We're especially open to working with people planning to relocate to Massachusetts.

Trash and tribulations

Malden hasn't had regular trash or recycling pickups for over a month. It stinks, it's inconvenient, and it's a huge gift to our local rodents - some of which have taken up in our yard.

The trash situation was caused by Republic Services not offering a fair contract to their workers. A strike is a last resort, and over a month in, they show no sign of giving in. In fact, more of them support the strike now than when it started.

At this point, several local mayors and even the governor have gotten involved. However, a judge has already struck down a request to enforce immediate trash collection. Even with severe delays for over a month, Republic Services likely can't be held in breach of contract.

Why not?!

Service contracts often include a force majeure or "Act of God" clause, originally intended for scenarios like natural disasters. But did you know that these clauses are often written to include labor disputes? This common practice lets companies "get away with" underpaying their workers by passing on the costs of labor disputes to their customers - in this case, our municipalities (and by extension us as residents and taxpayers). Local governments often sign bad contracts like this because they don't realize their lack of negotiation will inevitably land them on the wrong side of a labor dispute.

At this time, the union is not asking anyone to let trash go uncollected, to harass scabs, or to get cities to cancel contracts with Republic Services. If you aren't a member of a union yourself, don't second guess or undermine their organizing: just do what they ask you to! In this case, show up to a picket line, or call Republic Services and pressure them into negotiating.

Repairs and renewal

In last month's update, we shared some initial pictures of our water damage incident. Unfortunately, the remediation efforts took a full month and were only partially successful. Our contractors prevented any structural issues but at the cost of removing multiple walls, all of the cabinets on them, and a lot of ceiling and flooring.

We're now looking at having to renovate multiple rooms across two floors without a chance to prepare. One of our most important community spaces will be out of commission for 3 to 6 months, and it's likely to cost a minimum of $50,000.

However, we're trying to find opportunity in the chaos! We can adopt a new layout that works better for event hosting. We'll be able to electrify our kitchen to improve health and reduce our reliance on natural gas. We may even do other construction on that floor while it's already unusable.

For a project like this, the initial demolition work is done by a different set of remediation contractors. We're currently interviewing general contractors for the rebuild/renovation work, and aim to select one next month. After that will come design and financing, followed by the actual construction.

As we get closer, we may send out a survey about how to change our layout to be more "event-friendly". We hope you'll have some cool ideas!

Coping with climate change

Saying that this year's weather was "unprecedented" is getting kind of tiring, don't you think? This year, all of our blackberries were booming, while our pawpaws didn't fruit at all. (We also got exactly One (1) hazelnut, but a squirrel got it while it was still green.)

Thanks to climate change, most locations in the United States have shifted at least a half-zone on the hardiness map since the 90s, and there's no sign this will stop. We do plant many kinds of native and traditional* plants, but they didn't evolve under these conditions and may behave differently as their ecosystems change and are disrupted. That's why we're also branching out to explore new options that aren't grown in Massachusetts yet.

*We have six apple trees, which are an interesting example of the difference. The species was introduced to New England over 400 years ago and is therefore non-native. However, they aren't considered invasive and have grown to play a key role in some ecosystems.

One of the reasons that climate change is so risky is that we don't know what the best adaptations or mitigations will be. That means we're pursuing multiple strategies and experimenting where we can.

Looking forward

August and September will be pretty quiet between vacations, move-in/move-out, and home repair. But we'll have some more updates soon:

• Our next quarterly planning meetings will be in late September and late December. They'll be announced on this mailing list when finalized.
• We're hoping to start a monthly "dinner and a movie" event, at least until it gets too cold in the garage. Have any suggestions?
• We're discussing what this year's Halloween party will look like! 🎃👀🔜

That's it for August, so make sure to reach out if you have any feedback about our mailing list or website, or content you think we should include.