Rochdale College was an experiment in student-run alternative education and co-operative living in Toronto, Canada from 1968 to 1975. It provided space for 840 residents in a co-operative living space. It was also an informal, noncredited free university where students and teachers would live together and share knowledge. The project ultimately failed when it could not cover its financing and neighbours complained that it had become a haven for drugs and crime.
Co-operative housing experiment Rochdale was the largest co-op residence in North America, occupying an 18-storey student residence at Bloor St. and Huron St. in downtown Toronto. It was situated on the edges of the University of Toronto's St. George campus, near to Yorkville, Toronto's hippie haven in the 1960s and early 1970s. The college took its name from Rochdale, a town in north-west England, where the world's first cooperative society was established in 1844. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers is usually considered the first successful co-operative enterprise, used as a model for modern co-ops, following the 'Rochdale Principles'. A group of 28 weavers and other artisans set up the society to open their own store selling food items they could not otherwise afford. Within ten years there were over 1,000 co-operative societies in the United Kingdom. The college's modern architecture was uniquely designed for communal living. Some areas were divided into independently operated communal units of about a dozen bedrooms (called ashrams), each with its own collective washroom, kitchen and dining room. Each unit was responsible for collecting rent and maintaining its own housekeeping. Other areas consisted of bachelor, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom apartments. On the first and second floor were common areas used for socialization, education, and commercial purposes. The roof was accessible from the 18th floor and was used for sunbathing. Clothing was optional.
Founding Rochdale began as a response to a growing need for student housing at the University of Toronto, and a nineteen-year-old entrepreneur and philosophy student, Howard Adelman, was hired by the Campus Co-operative to meet the housing demand in 1958. With Adelman's advice, Campus Co-op began to acquire more properties, and formed Campus Co-operative Residence Incorporated., a non-profit offshoot of Campus Co-op. After obtaining federal mortgages at well below the market rate, Campus Co-op incorporated Rochdale College in 1964. It was by accident rather than design that Rochdale became such a tall building. Campus Co-op preferred to have the building be built to two times coverage, which would have resulted in a relatively easily managed building whose floor area would be only twice the size of the lot. However, due to Rochdale's location on a busy arterial road, the site was zoned at seven times coverage. This meant an unanticipated jump to 840 residents, a fact that was originally greeted with great enthusiasm, due to the expansionist attitudes of the founders. Zoning regulations also stipulated that the site was to be an apartment-hotel, which meant that only half the floor space could be used for apartments with self-contained kitchens. This disadvantage was not fully appreciated due to faith in a communal system, in which residents would be expected to effectively share the space available to them. In addition, the west and east wings differed by planners’ fiat in matters of self-containment and density of intended occupation. The west wing attracted a population that was relatively stable, an attraction helped by one-year leases, while the east wing attracted more transient tenants. The west-wing units were more in demand, not surprisingly when the rent structure in the first years gave an Aphrodite for two at $135 a month in the west wing and a Gnostic for two, with less space, at $200 a month in the east. With this rent structure, for some time the east wing subsidized the “landed gentry” in the west. The west wing with its self-contained units [the apartments] tended to stay aloof from the east wing [the hotel], and east-wing residents often were uninterested in the operations of the College. In a symbolic rather than a practical sense, a visible seal was put on this east-west division by a fire door that split the floors in half. Campus Co-op, the parent corporation of Rochdale College, was uncomfortable with education taking a central role at Rochdale, a position held strongly by Rochdale's intellectual leaders such as Dennis Lee. A decision was made to separate from Campus Co-op. Further emphasis was placed on education when Adelman noted that the college's $175,000 property tax could be avoided if they had a functioning educational program. In Adelman's words, if "we run an education program for $75,000, we'll come out $100,000 ahead." Although many Rochdale founders viewed its education program as a form of tax avoidance, those who were dedicated to Rochdale as an educational institution did not let that deter them from pursuing what they viewed as a more noble purpose. Dennis Lee, the creative talent of the operation, notes plans like the tax avoidance scheme were, "primarily in the thinking of people like Howard who were involved in the planning, they did a good job of keeping their cards fairly close to their chest. It was not something that was being passed around generally, [...] it would have made other people completely furious to hear it at the time." Yet it would be inaccurate to conclude that Adelman, the organizational talent of the operation, did not share its educational goals. With Lee, Adelman edited a collection of articles published in 1968 that constituted a manifesto of sorts for "free university" education, calling for liberation from inhibiting educational institutions. Adelman's contribution was a particularly scathing indictment of the modern university as an institution that stifles innovation and serves only the establishment. Even before its construction, there was a tension in Rochdale between fiscal responsibility and idealism. Mietkiewicz writes, "[p]erhaps because of their idealistic preoccupations, few of Rochdale's academic leaders were fully aware that much of Campus Co-op's enthusiasm for education had stemmed from its vision of the program as a sort of tax dodge."
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