In Atchison Village, residents split expenses and share concerns about air pollution

Marcos Alvarez grew up in Atchison Village, having moved there with his family when he was young, joining several cousins who came before him. He found the Richmond neighborhood to be like his native Mexico: a tight-knit community where everyone knew and looked out for each other. 

He eventually moved away and got married to his now-wife, Sylvia. The newlywed couple soon had a child and began looking to buy their first home. But like many millennial couples, they had trouble finding places they could afford. Eventually, Marcos turned his gaze back to Atchison Village, where the pair could afford to buy a house for a fraction of what it might cost them in many other parts of the Bay Area. 

“This was the only attainable place to buy a house in the area,” Sylvia, a 35-year-old speech therapist, said. “There were still some challenges, financially, to make it work, but it would have been much harder to buy in any other neighborhood for us at this point.”

Thankfully, the Alvarezes were able to get a two-bedroom home with their savings, some help from family and financing from a community credit union set up specifically to serve residents of Atchison Village. The house needed some remodeling, but Marcos, 41, who is a contractor, was able to handle most of it. 

Atchison Village offered the Alvarezes relative affordability in the middle of one of country’s most expensive regions. But it came with some trade-offs, including being in an area right next to local pollution sources, namely the Richmond Parkway, the arterial road which acts as the neighborhood’s northwest border, and the Chevron refinery just on the other side. 

Sylvia said she and her husband’s biggest concern about the neighborhood is how local air pollution could impact the health of their almost 2-year-old son. 

“It’s definitely on my mind, especially raising a young child here. But we also just don’t have many other options of neighborhoods to live in right now, so I kind of just hope that it’s gonna be okay,” Sylvia said, adding she often sees people posting on social media when there’s flaring at Chevron. “It’s really scary.”

Atchison Village was built in the early 1940s for managers working in the Kaiser Shipyards — part of a national effort under the federal Lanham Community Facilities Act to house defense workers during World War II. It became home to workers recruited from all over the country who helped to make Richmond’s shipyards some of the most productive in the U.S. at that time, where famed “Rosies” churned out up to three ships a day. 

But, following the war, the federal government began tearing down its housing stock. So, in 1956, village residents banded together to buy the property for $1.5 million — equivalent to nearly $18 million today — creating the Atchison Village Mutual Homes Corporation, one of the first housing cooperatives in California, where homeowners buy a share of the mutual benefit corporation in exchange for the right to perpetually use their unit.

Billing itself as a “modest residential oasis,” Atchison Village today has 450 small housing units — all less than 1,000 square feet — on 30 acres, sandwiched between heavy industry and the remains of Richmond’s once vibrant downtown. A 554-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bathroom house there was recently listed for $200,000. By comparison, a similar-sized home in need of extensive renovations in another part of Richmond at around the same time was listed for $350,000.

Atchison Village’s neighbor to the west, the Chevron Richmond refinery, predates the neighborhood by three decades. Pollution from the refinery has been linked to health risks for people in the village and other surrounding neighborhoods. Village members are also inundated with bad air from the adjacent Richmond Parkway and railyard. 

Living up to its name of being a village

Barbara Postel moved to the village in 2011, a year before one of the largest refinery fires to date. She said she was worried about air pollution at first, but has come to accept it as part of the price for having an affordable place to live in the Bay Area. 

“At least I’m not trying to raise kids here,” she said. 

Postel, now 70, said she’s on the “younger end of the old people” who live in the community, and said there are many advantages to aging in Atchison Village, such as having plenty of neighbors around to help take care of you, the single-story homes that all have front and backyards, and the shared courtyards where neighbors often see and spend time with one another. 

“It’s a really nice place to age in place,” Postel said. 

Atchison Village has its own newsletter, the Atchison Riveter, where the housing collective’s board election results are published. The latest, held in June, had a 55% voter turnout. The goings on of the gardening and social clubs are also published in the Riveter, along with community events and home-care tips.  

A shared community building, credit union, four-acre park with a playground, and walking paths that weave throughout the area are all features of the village. There’s only one way in and one way out via Macdonald Avenue. Villagers decided to seal up the other exits in the 1980s when the neighboring Iron Triangle and other nearby neighborhoods had a reputation for being more rough and tumble than they are today. 

Atchison Village even has its own holiday: Every year, residents get together to observe Founding Day. This year’s celebration was on Sept. 28, when they honored founding members still living. 

Madeline Marrow moved to the neighborhood in 2013 and says it lives up to its name of being a village. “It’s all insular,” she said.”A lot of people that live here, they’ve been here their whole life.”

It’s not uncommon for people to inherit their homes from their parents, and many have never lived outside the village. People who live there refer to each other as “members,” because they collectively own everything, and everyone is responsible for the repairs and upkeep. 

This includes paying the salaries of the seven staff members, the shared power bill, and taxes, as well as repairs and upgrades to the 80-year-old buildings. Many have received solar panels thanks to government-funded programs, and others have received heat pumps. 

Because many residents are low income and living off of Social Security, Marrow said residents take it hard when membership dues increase due to the rising cost of things such as maintenance, property taxes and insurance. Paying more is a hard ask, she said, considering the number of people on a fixed income. 

Raising dues is a thorny political subject that also plays out on the village’s 11-member board, as major repair projects are needed throughout the village.

Kaytlyn O’Connor learned of Atchison Village from her mom, who taught in Richmond schools and had several students who lived there. 

In 2021, when she and her now-husband, David Korman, were looking to move in together, they found the housing search daunting. That was until they found an open two-bedroom, two-story home in Atchison Village at a sliver of the cost of a traditional single-family home.

While Atchison Village is an oasis in the extremely expensive Bay Area housing market, O’Connor said, it does come with a financial hitch. 

“You can’t get a mortgage like you would for a regular house because you’re buying a share in a cooperative,” O’Connor said. “You have to pay upfront cash.” 

O’Connor and her partner found a way to finance their new home and will likely have it paid off in a third of the time it might take a traditional homeowner. O’Connor said many residents obtain the cash to invest in Atchison Village by downsizing from larger homes. 

“I do think this would be a great place for a lot of people if they came and checked it out,” O’Connor said. “It’s pretty lovely. It has a small town life in the Bay Area, but then you hear the clang of the refinery, so it’s an interesting juxtaposition.”

The ability to organize as a collective

Every few years, Chevron will invite Atchison Village members to tour the refinery, and the company pays to keep a trailer on site as part of its community air monitoring program. 

When the trailer was installed and findings were published to a website showing air quality levels in Atchison Village, Postel said she spent about six months trying to make sense of the readings. “It was pretty dense,” she said. “I finally gave up.”

O’Connor said she is inspired by the activism that has led to Chevron and other nearby polluters having to lower their emissions to safeguard the health of her neighbors, and looks forward to what her fellow Atchison Village residents can accomplish collectively. 

“We are a much tighter knit community than some of the other neighborhoods because we all share the same water bill, and we all collectively own this property,” she said. “So when it comes to organizing, we do have a little more power politically.”

For the Alvarezes, being one of the few young couples with children in the village has some distinct advantages, especially the intergenerational dynamics. 

“We love it,” Sylvia Alvarez said. “I just think about how much I feel like it’s benefiting all of us in this situation. We’re kind of looking out for each other. I’ve never had this much contact with neighbors in any other neighborhood that I’ve lived in, so that’s been really nice.”