Doherty

Housing co-operatives come in numerous forms. Some, like tenant management co-operatives, are more limited – offering tenants only the right to act as collective agents to a single landlord. But the more substantive varieties involve collective ownership. This is the real essence of the housing co-operative: the collective as the landlord.

From time to time these schemes devolve into spats over equity between participants – but often they work, and in doing so manage to radically reduce housing costs for co-operative members.

In the UK only 196,000 people live in housing co-operatives, but models elsewhere in Europe show how they could grow to provide a real alternative to shelling out to a landlord. In Sweden 22% of the housing stock is co-operatively owned. In Denmark, the figure is 20%. Across the continent, housing co-operatives offer not only more affordable options but a means to building more democratic urban spaces.

In Switzerland the Wohnbaugenossenschaften, a special type of housing co-operative, are responsible for more than 5 per cent of the entire country’s housing stock. The country has a long co-operative history – and in this case it was supermarket co-operatives which acted as anchor institutions for housing co-operatives, helping them buy up large swathes of land on the edge of cities such as Zürich.

The dire state of housing in 1980s and ’90s Zürich played a key role in the rise of the sector. As the city moved towards being a financial capital, it saw rent skyrocket. Apartments were often left empty with their owners focused on profiting from a quick resale, and out of this desperation for affordable housing a mass co-operative movement emerged.

The Swiss model of housing is very different to Britain’s, with only nine percent of the population owning their home due to high housing and land costs. Housing co-operatives in Switzerland offer accommodation roughly 20 percent below market levels. But once loans are paid off co-operatives can offer living costs at the price simply needed to maintain buildings – a radical transformation in the amount people can expect to pay for their shelter.

Many housing co-ops in Switzerland also offer complementary services – childcare, health services, social services and common activities, which reduce living costs and help build community cohesion. And their growth is supported by a popular movement: in a referendum, three quarters of Swiss voters supported a ballot measure mandating that affordable, non-profit apartments make up one third of the city’s total rental stock by the year 2050.

Iwan Doherty