KulshanCLT’s first homeowner, decades later
After more than two decades in her quirky Birchwood home, KulshanCLT’s first homeowner Jen looks around her living room at the thriving jungle of plants and eclectic handmade art from New Orleans. “I’m sure minimalists would find this cluttered, but everything is a memory. This is my life in here.”
Jen was born in wartime England in 1943 and came to the States in 1964. “Same year as the Beatles!” she exclaims. “I was a GI bride. The marriage didn’t last, like a lot of those hasty marriages, but I really, really liked it here.” After living in Alaska for ten years, Jen found her way to Bellingham in 1988. Her oldest daughter had graduated from Anchorage High School, and her two younger children would go on to graduate from Bellingham High.
Jen struggled to find work in Bellingham at first. “I had been most of my life in the medical field. When I came here, though, I had no luck getting a job. I was a respiratory therapist who had been out of the business for a little while. I worked in the school as a secretary while I was in Alaska.” She was finally hired as a clerk at the Whatcom County courthouse, where she would spend the rest of her career. “N.F. Jackson hired me,” Jen laughs. “He said it’s because I showed up in a leather mini skirt and my résumé picture had my cat on my shoulder. I had a wonderful time working there. I loved it.”
Even with a steady job, buying a home was out of the question for Jen, who was making $8.50 an hour and commuting back and forth from an apartment in Ferndale. “I had a divorce,” she says, “Which is how a lot of women end up poor and in apartments. I really thought, ‘This is my life.’”
Jen first heard about Kulshan Community Land Trust from co-founder Bill Sterling, who she knew from the Wild Buffalo nightclub in Bellingham. “Bill was the doorman, and we struck up a friendship that has remained strong ever since, until he passed away,” Jen remembers. “Bill said, ‘We’re starting this land trust, and we think you’d be an ideal candidate because you have a steady job, no debt, and you’re living in an apartment.’ My heart leapt at the idea of being able to control my own space again. And have a garden!”
Because Jen’s was the first house to come into the trust, it took a while to get everything in order. The home became hers in 2002.
She remembers walking in the door for the first time: “It was instant recognition. They had all the blinds open, there was just light everywhere, and I knew that I was going to fill it with things that liked the light.” She hit it off with the previous owners, who ended up taking less than their highest bid to ensure that the house would remain a neighborhood place instead of a business. “I think it was just meant to be,” Jen reflects. “I do like the coziness of it. It’s not too big; I don’t rattle around in here. And I said, ‘I’m only leaving this place feet-first.’”
Jen has become an avid ambassador for the community land trust model. “I have friends that are moving and qualifying into senior housing, and I think to myself, I wish they had got on the list a long time ago. They’re all respectable, single, working women of a certain age, you know?” She tells all the young people of her acquaintance about KulshanCLT and encourages them to apply.
Looking out the window at the fruit trees she planted in memory of her mother and her daughter after their deaths, Jen reflects, “To have a place that’s your own… I just feel safe. I feel right. And I think that’s a human condition, to want a home.”