Before the stock market crash of October 1929, U-M typically enrolled about 12,000 students. Most came from secure, comfortable families that could more or less easily afford the costs of tuition (about $100 for in-staters), housing ($30-40 a month, a little more for women), food (maybe $15 a week), and books (about $30 a term). By the end of the 1929-30 school year, a thousand students—nearly 10 percent of the total—no longer could pay those costs and dropped out. Autumn after autumn, fewer students showed up. Part-time jobs all but disappeared. U-M couldn’t lower its fees because funding from Lansing had fallen by more than a third, and there was virtually no financial aid. A story went around campus that certain students were so short of food money that they scheduled their classes for Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to conserve energy by staying in bed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In September 1932, the writer Edmund G. Love recalled, “the Ann Arbor that I went back to was like a ghost town.”

***

Some months earlier, two students, Charlie Orr and Len Kimball, had been sitting around talking. They were socialists—followers of Norman Thomas, who would take nearly a million votes in that year’s presidential election—and members of a U-M socialist club called the Roundtable Club. Orr said the club should quit talking about socialism and start practicing it. Broke students needed room and board. The club renamed itself the Socialist Club and put together a plan. One of the oldest houses in town—335 E. Ann, still standing across from City Hall—was available for $55 a month. The club signed a lease and put out a plea for cast-off beds, tables and chairs. They asked any farmer within 70 miles of Ann Arbor to donate produce; in exchange, they’d give the farmer’s son, if he wanted to go to college, rent-free living. Only students who would otherwise have to drop out were invited, with “socially minded” non-drinkers preferred. The fees were what attracted attention — $1 a week for a bed, $1 a week for food, about 10 percent of the usual expenses. The founders christened it the Michigan Socialist House. But around campus it was quickly known just as “the two-dollar house.” It filled immediately—26 men in a house built for a family of six.

***

The tightest possible economies were imposed. A volunteer house steward bought most of the food from local farmers. A day’s typical menu was, for breakfast, oatmeal, applesauce and coffee; for lunch, soup, creamed carrots and cabbage slaw with bacon; for dinner, salmon loaf, baked potato, vegetables, tea and cookies. No tablecloths, no napkins. Provisions were put on a scale; 24 diners needed 13 pounds of potatoes, no more. Guests paid 15 cents a meal, 25 cents to spend the night. The house provided 60-watt light bulbs; if you wanted a hundred-watt bulb, it was five cents a week. To take a bath, you used the water heater for 25 minutes, then turned it off. All cooking and housework was cooperative, with daily and weekly responsibilities for each man. A committee appointed by the elected house board inspected each room weekly.

***

Most residents were graduate students. Several were in their late 20s and 30s, and a number were foreign students. There was Sher Mohamed Quraishi, an Indian who spoke eight languages; Erwin Lindhorst, a Detroiter who called himself a Communist; Stewart Way, a socialist in electrical engineering from a small town in Pennsylvania; Carl Nelson, a self-described anarchist from the Upper Peninsula; Paul Howells, who identified his politics as “Futilitarian;” and Richard Bohland, a 30-year-old from west Michigan who said he was “only a farm boy trying to get along.””Looking for more broadening contacts than those offered by the ordinary run of students,” reported Larry Lipsett, an upstate New Yorker, “I was unsatisfied until I moved into the Socialist House, where I have found the heterogeneity and personalities intensely stimulating and often amusing.”

***

Was the Socialist House really socialist? Certainly not in the Marxist sense, since the house belonged to a private property-owner, not a government entity. It would be more accurate simply to call it a cooperative, and it was one of the first college housing co-ops in the country, possibly the first. It spawned U-M’s co-op tradition. A group split off to form the Wolverine Eating Co-operative, which met for years in the basement of Lane Hall on State Street. (The playwright Arthur Miller was a member.) An early try at a woman’s Socialist House didn’t work at first, but others soon followed, along with others for both sexes, leading to the organization in 1937 of a co-op council to share costs. By World War II there were eight men’s houses and three women’s. Only three of those survived the war, but the co-ops revived and flourished in the 1960s and ’70s. Today the Inter-Cooperative Council coordinates 18 group houses and one apartment house, with memberships ranging from a dozen to more than 80.

There’s no two-dollar house any more. But at a cost of $578 a month for room and meals, the co-ops still provide one of the best housing deals in Ann Arbor.

Did you live in a co-op? What was it like? Share your story in the comments section below.