Abstract
Cooperative housing is experiencing a resurgence of interest worldwide. As a more democratic and affordable alternative to dominant housing provision, it is often heralded as a blueprint for ‘housing commons’. Despite its long history, however, cooperative housing has rarely gone beyond a ‘niche’ in the housing market. Recent critical housing scholarship is beginning to address this marginalisation and understand how a more widespread development of the sector can be supported. In times and places where cooperative housing has expanded beyond a ‘niche’ solution, the role of the state, through policy making at national, regional and municipal scale, stands out as an important enabling factor. Drawing on ten international cases, this study presents a framework for a rigorous and politically meaningful comparative approach to public-cooperative policy mechanisms for ‘housing commons’. Three key phases in the housing process (production, access and management, and maintenance of the model in time) are identified and discussed through concrete examples of policy areas and mechanisms. The article contributes to scholarship on cooperative housing policy making and ‘housing commons’ and argues for a shift in attention to questions of accessibility over time, and the thorny issue of permanent decommodification.
Highlights
Cooperative housing has been receiving renewed attention as one of the possible responses to the ‘return of the Housing Question’ (Hodkinson, 2012b) since the 2007-8 mortgage meltdown and global financial crisis
In what follows we discuss in greater detail the three key phases or ‘moments’ of the framework we propose, outline corresponding policy areas and offer examples of concrete policies to illustrate its significance for understanding cooperative housing as a commons and its relationship to public policy making
Faced with new urban enclosures, collective forms of housing production and management have seen a resurgence of comparative scholarship (Czischke et al, 2020; Tummers, 2016) and international political organising, with a particular resurgence of interest in cooperative housing
Summary
Cooperative housing has been receiving renewed attention as one of the possible responses to the ‘return of the Housing Question’ (Hodkinson, 2012b) since the 2007-8 mortgage meltdown and global financial crisis. Cooperative housing has rarely gone beyond a ‘niche’ in the housing market (Saegert & Benıtez, 2005), a ‘supplementary form of tenure’ (Kemeny, 1981) or a degree of ‘tokenism’ (Harloe, 1988). An alternative, it would seem, for those other than the ‘happy few’. In the times and places where cooperative housing has expanded beyond the margins, state support and recognition stand out as key enabling factors. Given the resurgence of cooperative ideas and practices as a response to the crisis of dominant housing provision, exploring the nexus between the state and the cooperative sector is key to understanding and developing what could be termed public-cooperative approaches to housing
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