After years of work and months of negotiations, Boston Community Co-ops now owns a twelve-bedroom property at 31 Leroy Street in Dorchester! With the Millstone Co-op continuing to operate in Somerville, we will now have 20 rooms of cooperative housing. We are very excited about this step forward for the organization and for the co-op movement in Greater Boston. The support of members of the community throughout the process has helped to bring us where we are now.

As we rehabilitate and settle into the Dorchester house, I am writing to ask you, once again, to show that support. When we bought the house, two floors contained lead paint, as well as the front porch. In order to create housing which is accessible to families with young children--and for general environmental purposes--we felt that it is important to remove this paint.

We had originally budgeted enough money to remove lead from one floor, but we decided to de-lead both floors as soon as possible. We are proud of this decision, but the process is quite costly, and it has put us over our initial budget for lead work. We were able to cover it, but we did so by diverting money from elsewhere in our budget.

So we are asking your help to generate the roughly $7,000 extra which we spent to create an environmentally safer house. If we can raise this money, it will create space in our budget for potential investments like environmentally efficient refrigerators which will benefit both the co-op's future prospects and the broader world. If we can raise even more than $7000, it may enable us eventually to lower rents, moving closer to our goal of maximum affordability.

Any donation to Boston Community Cooperatives is tax-deductible, and we welcome any gift you can give. In addition, we are still offering the possibility of investing in BCC by lending us money. We offer better interest rates than most savings accounts, ranging from 2% for a loan of $500 to 4% for a loan of $10,000. These rates are lower than bank rates, helping us to keep our costs down and keep the project affordable while still providing a benefit to you, our lenders. We are thrilled that a number of our friends and allies have invested in us, and we hope that you will too. For more information on loans to BCC, see our commitment form.

Again, thanks so much for your support. If you aren't able to help us financially, there is still lots that you can do, including joining us for a cleaning party (two floors of the house were unoccupied for some time, leaving us lots to do to clean them!), letting us know if you have furniture available (we're especially looking for a big dining room table), lending a truck to help move things, or just visiting ! Give us a call at 617-436-2965 or reply to this e-mail.