Eugene’s hip and alternative student co-op crowd lies between the unlikely neighbors of a Mormon church and a sorority house. Here, the Lorax lifestyle strives for a utopian ideal.
“It’s really hard to get out of the house — it’s just a community of its own,” said Sage, a new resident who attends Lane Community College.
The house may be far from where the grickle grass grows, but the catchy Dr. Seuss poem for which the house was named still resonates with the environmentally active students. 
“We speak for the trees,” University undergraduate Steve Berk said.
With the collective spirit of its residents, the Lorax Manner is very much a living, breathing being. Many students walk by every day but only see it from the outside — an old Victorian building with a yard that seems always to be celebrating Halloween and a group of cyclists hanging out in the alleyway on the side of the house. Inside, the Lorax is full of life, its teeming inhabitants working together like ants to maintain and perfect their home.
“I was really impressed as a rebellious teenager. I was attracted to the strangeness,” resident Monica Joseph said. “There’s always something exciting going on.”
A mannequin dressed in Christmas lights and “Hubert,” the toothless, official imaginary friend of the Lorax Manner are a few of their creations. Bikes hang from walls, bikes hang on poles, bikes scatter the alleyway and bikes block the closet-turned-phone-booth at the front door. Animating the colorful walls, one painting or scribbling leads to the next, weaving the house into a unified composition.
“The first time I came here, these people were like, “Come draw on the walls,’” Sage said. “You can do whatever you want.”
The co-ops have no landlord, or rather, they have no single landlord. The idea of the co-ops is to focus less on spending money and more on sustaining one’s habitat directly, by means of sharing, growing their own food and doing their own maintenance.
On Saturday, Sage was working on his Halloween costume, comprising 20 papier-mâché masks to represent his various personal qualities. The LGBTQA was just finishing a potluck, and a crowd of people playing capture the flag stormed down the old fire escape, thus shaking the tomato pots hanging from bicycle tubes.
In the living room, visitors gathered for a candle-lit tarot card reading, and the hip-hop/folk band “Explorers of the Dreamworld” was just arriving. Another group gravitated around the foosball table, while others planned their next ’80s dance party on the kitchen counter.
Putting his mask aside and walking up the spinning stairwell to the second floor, Sage passed a bulky, out-of-date computer squeezed into a tight, blood red closet with a low, uncomfortable-looking fold-up chair. Down the hallway, University undergraduate John Zatkowsky, who has lived at the Lorax for a year, was cleaning his room and listening to Cascadian black metal as he greeted the others under a set of Tibetan prayer flags hanging from his doorway.
A minute later, Zatkowsky led the way through a door labeled “no access.” The fairly well-kept fourth story attic is the storage space for microscopes, hamster cages, water guns and just about everything else.
Zatkowsky pointed to the dark, three-by-four foot hole leading to the inside of the recognizable Lorax tower, rumored to be haunted since the days that the house was a sorority. Legend claims that a devastated girl hanged herself there after finding out she was pregnant. Resident Troy Grudin described having once felt an eerie and unnatural coldness while giving visitors a tour of the house, but tonight the only frightening scene in the tower was a parrot piñata.
“This is a pretty creepy place in the dark,” Zatkowsky said.
Poking his head outside, Zatkowsky climbed to the roof and nudged a sleeping bag to check if someone’s slumber was being disturbed.
“This is best view of Eugene you can get by far in the city,” Zatkowsky said proudly, remarking that he likes to chart the sunset through the seasons. At the edge of the roof, two trees are used to practice fix-line climbing.
To really understand how the house works, Zatkowsky explained as he made his way back into the attic, one has to attend a house meeting where the group uses secret hand signals to facilitate discussion.
“Consensus or none is the cornerstone of the co-op community,” Zatkowsky said.
With the consensus ideal, it is necessary for all the students to agree. Even a single objection will fail the vote; however, a vote should not be blocked unless it is serious enough a matter that one is prepared to move out of the house if it passes.
Sometimes the ideal of having everyone contribute has been taxing at the Lorax. In one matter, the house got rid of its couches for an entire term, and later this turned out to be more of an annoyance. Another time, students debated whether, in the vegan household, it was ethical to poison the rats in their attic. This took two terms for the co-op to finally come to a conclusion, and some residents even moved out in protest.
The foundation of the co-ops depends on the students’ ability to cooperate and their willingness to be productive in their community. The Lorax provides its members lunch and dinner every day. For a house of 26 people, everything has to be done in bulk, and it is an undertaking to cook every night.
“It’s hard for me to cook for just one or two people anymore,” said Sam Bennington, a LCC student who said a typical dish is stir-fry.
Although the majority of residents are not vegan, the house serves only vegan dishes. They try to keep their food sources under a distance of 100 miles, sometimes growing the food themselves at their Alton Baker community garden, and other times working at local farms in exchange for food.
Students give back to the house through chores, which rotate each term “to keep chaos from ensuing.” Considering all the food that gets made, there are also five regularly scheduled dishwashing shifts during the day, which explains why some people were still working on Saturday night.
The students have worked out a point system, in which everyone is assigned around 13 points, depending on the amount of people in the house, and each point equals a half-hour of work, which can go towards washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms, repairing bicycles or facilitating house discussions.
“We have this awesome house together, and we can’t just let it fall down,” Joseph said as she mopped the kitchen floor.
“It’s absolutely been a blessing for me,” Zatkowsky said in agreement. “People should come by more often. We would love to see more faces.”
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