This article originally appeared in Bedford + Bowery.
Many townhouses on this block in Bedford-Stuyvesant look nearly identical—the same stairs lead up to clean, white stone facades and glass doors with black frames—so much so that, walking past, I wonder if the same contractor has recently remodeled them. But the house I’m heading for stands out. Past the rusting gate, there are mismatching chairs—including a repurposed and faded bike taxi seat—encircling a makeshift coffee table, and the slightly battered front door is secured with a keypad deadbolt.
The differences become even more apparent once inside. The hallway is narrow, with at least six bicycles leaning or hanging on the walls, along with containers overflowing with helmets and other gear. “These are the bikes we actually use,” Amy, one of the residents, tells me. In the backyard and basement, there are parts for more than 25 more. But this isn’t a bike shop: it’s Noyes, a housing collective where eight unrelated people live together in a means that differs radically from that of most others living in New York.
The collective was founded in 2012, a time of pushback against exploitative capitalism, when hundreds of people encamped in Zuccotti Park as part of the Occupy movement. Sarah and Clark, having met while organizing for Occupy, founded the collective around similar political objectives and, in part, because her previous collective wouldn’t allow cats. It’s now one of a least a dozen collectives in north Brooklyn alone. This is “an area where young radicals are moving,” Amy says, as I sit at Noyes’s kitchen table with her and Jedidiah, another resident, who continues to pluck noncommittally at the banjo in his lap. (All names used in this piece—including the names of the various collectives—are pseudonyms per the request of the residents.)
I’ve been interested in collectives and communes since my aunt—the first Stephanie Sugars—moved to Moonlight Farm in Kenwood, California a decade ago. She was a teen in the Bay Area in the late 1960s, and was there in ‘67 when the Summer of Love drew hippies, anti-capitalists, artists and beatniks to San Francisco and collectives began in the United States in earnest. When years of serious illness prevented her from having a formal job, even if she had wanted one, life on the farm provided her stability and community when she could not have afforded much else. The farm is mostly self-sustaining, raising livestock—they had a cow named Sal, short for Salisbury Steak—and maintaining a vegetable garden alongside fruit trees. Her low living expenses enabled her to spend her time painting, participating in a potluck group, leading cancer survivor groups and reading and writing voraciously until she passed in November 2016. Her memorial, a full five months later, was held nearby and attended by nearly 150 people who were close to her.