Housing Commons
Discussion
Tomor, Zsuzsanna; de Waal, Martijn:
"One example of this is the co-housing movement that has sprung up in recent years. Many projects in this realm can be found in the German-speaking countries of Europe, but increasingly also elsewhere, amongst others in the Netherlands. This type of housing development has taken manifold forms, and they are motivated by both pragmatic and ideological objectives such as affordable residences, economic advantage, environmental sustainability, solidarity, social justice, countering neoliberal capitalism or decreasing solitude. These diverse motives notwithstanding collective housing projects are comparable as they are all based on the participatory creation, usage and management of resources and a high level of self-management (Larsen, 2019; Ruiu, 2014; Wang et al., 2020). This includes both the housing unit itself, as well as additional resources such as collective spaces, food, care, transport, etc.
Linking housing to the idea of commons "may seem contradictory […] because housing is more often associated with privacy and [private] property than with sharing and collectivisation" (Tummers & MacGregor, 2019, p. 69). Indeed, housing is a subtractable and excludable resource and often understood as an economic investment aimed at capital gain. However, if recognized as a societal resource, the management and fair distribution of housing reveals similar challenges – e.g. the threats of gentrification, disinvestment, demolition, displacement, scarcity, or lack of affordability – as other common goods (Dragutinovic et al., 2022; Gidwani & Baviskar, 2011). In this regard, it is not surprising that community-based housing is widely seen as a promising movement to foster social, economic and ecological sustainability. A growing number of co-housing groups see housing as a common good and have taken measures to remove their project from the speculative housing market and to manage it as a common pool under joint management arrangements. Such a take on collective housing is increasingly endorsed by local governments as part of their urban development strategies, fitting in the trends of decentralization, self-reliability, and participation. (Durose et al., 2021; Aernouts & Ryckewaert, 2017, 2018; Angotti, 2008; Bunce, 2016). In relation to commoning, cohousing can then be understood as an excludable resource, developed, and managed as a common property regime set up by the residents themselves, according to mutual values that promote social relations, sustainability, and affordability. However, as we will see below, the process of turning these abstract values into a concrete social regime and actual physical design is a complex process. When a group of actors intend to set up a co-housing scheme, a range of aspects need to be considered early on, and an integral design framework covering the physical, social, spatial and governance components could help to structure the founding process of such a future commons. "
(https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1144&context=iasdr)
Source: ‘Becommoning’: a design-framework for the initiation of new commons. doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.381
See: The Becommoning Design Framework.
Housing as Commons, discussion in the Netherlands, 2018
Roel Griffioen:
"As living space in Amsterdam is becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, and gentrification is rampant, the call for a reassessment of the way in which the city is shaped is getting louder and louder. This was very noticeable in the run-up to the Amsterdam municipal elections of 21 March 2018; the first elections in decades in which housing was without a doubt the central theme that all parties, from the far left to the far right, felt they had to address.
What struck me the most amongst all the saber-rattling and show-wrestling that we call political campaigning, was the militant tone that the centre-left parties adopted on this subject. For example, the election manifesto of the Green Party, GroenLinks, stated in no uncertain terms: “We are going to curb the much praised free market”. The diagnosis is rightly made that if the market forces were to be unleashed, Amsterdam would soon transform into an enclave for an economic elite surrounded by the various peripheral misery belts for those who are lagging behind socially and economically. To avoid this, and to maintain the social mix that characterizes the city, the sale of corporation-owned housing must be curbed. The election manifesto of the Dutch Labour Party, PvdA, also explicitly places the problem in the context of a rampant housing market:
Amsterdam is a city for everyone. But our housing market is overheating. The city is in danger of becoming unaffordable. We do not want Amsterdam to become a city for the rich. We want to prevent houses from becoming even more expensive. We will protect Amsterdam from slum landlords, bad investors and commercial holiday rentals. (…) Amsterdam must remain Amsterdam. But Amsterdam’s social character is at stake. The city is increasingly in the grip of the pursuit of profit.[1]
Such campaign language reveals that, thank God, the political stale-mate of the third way-ish market-friendly socio-liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s is finally losing traction. Not too long ago center-left and center-right parties basically agreed that urban growth can best be achieved through public-private partnerships, deregulation, and state-led gentrification. It is a relief to see that parties such as PvdA and GroenLinks are now retracing their steps. It is also encouraging that a municipal administration is currently being drawn up with no fewer than three parties (GroenLinks, PvdA and the Socialist Party, SP) that, in the run-up to the elections, have called for more social and affordable housing and for restrictions on investors in the housing market. They will most likely form a coalition with D66, a liberal centre party that calls for social housing dwellings to be transferred to the free market in order to keep the city accessible to middle-income groups. According to local daily newspaper Het Parool, housing is therefore in all likelihood the most important stumbling block in the formation of a coalition.
Nevertheless, some reservations regarding the new political wind blowing in the Stopera, Amsterdam’s city hall, seem justified. To begin with, many policies effective today are still implicitly or explicitly market-oriented and pro-gentrification. This means that the tough campaign language of GroenLinks and the other left-wing parties will have to be followed up by a considerable administrative effort. In addition, the electorate has not forgotten that the same center-left itself has been at the heart of a whole series of measures and reforms that have deepened the housing crisis in Amsterdam. These include the privatization of housing corporations in the 1990s, the gentrification-friendly ‘Broedplaatsten’-policy (Creative Incubator policy) designed by GroenLinks alderman Maarten van Poelgeest in the 2000s, and more recently the introduction of new precarious, temporary tenancies by the Rutte II cabinet, in which the PvdA took part. This warrants doubts about the political ‘stewardship’ of the city administration, regardless of the political color of the parties participating in it, and it also raises questions about the endurance of ‘good’ housing and planning policies in face of ever changing political undercurrents and priorities. Can political parties in our representative democracy be entrusted with public housing, given their track record, including that of the Left, of squandering the public housing legacy in the recent past?
Even more important is the question of whether the current housing crisis in Amsterdam can be resolved politically at the municipal level. Can the housing market still be contained, or are we witnessing a tragic case of ‘too little, too late’? Can the local government regain control? This problem is nicely illustrated by the double legacy of the outgoing Housing alderman, Laurens Ivens of the SP, the most outspoken left-wing politician we have had in that position for decades. Following the example of the illustrious housing alderman Jan Schaefer in the 70s and 80s, Ivens has himself presented as an alderman who prefers the construction site to the conference table; a politician, moreover, who believes that the state should take the lead in urban development. And his figures are rather impressive. Under Ivens, more than 9,000 homes were completed in Amsterdam last year; which is approximately 15% of the total number of homes completed in the Netherlands. However, despite this astounding figure under his period in office, the number of social rental dwellings and middle-cost owner-occupied and rented homes under his control has actually fallen, while the segment of expensive homes rose from 21 to 29 percent. While under Ivens construction is progressing at record speed, the sale of social property continues at an even faster pace, especially in the centrally located districts. Ivens himself sighed that it feels as if he is “cleaning up a flooded room without turning off the taps” (dweilen met de kraan open).
Sadly, the truth is that a return to the vigorous Amsterdam housing policies of Schaefer is not very feasible. For many reasons: the financial stakes have become too high; political mandates are limited; the public planning apparatus has weakened considerably over the last few decades; and national legislation is still encouraging housing corporations to continue to sell off social housing. Moreover, private stakeholders today are much wealthier and more powerful than in the past: the market parties with which the city is now negotiating and competing are no longer yesteryears picturesque local slumlords, but internationally operating investment funds and venture capital firms, who have ample means to resist regulation. In addition, Amsterdam’s public housing policy has traditionally been linked to urban expansion, but space for large new housing developments is quite simply lacking.
But if local government can’t and the market shouldn’t be in charge of the future of the city, to whom or what should we turn? In order to escape this conceptual impasse, more and more people are attracted to the idea of the ‘commons’, the popularity of which is underlined by endless stream of lectures and workshops, research groups, articles and books recently devoted to the subject; a young tradition that the Urban Commons of Culture platform is now seeking to join.
The term ‘the commons’ is, of course, notoriously unruly and elastic, but in its most minimal definition it describes a symbolic space that exists alongside the spheres of the market and the state, a space that is given substance through collective use and management. Examples of urban commons that recur frequently in the extensive popular literature on the subject include bottom-up social centres, squatted or improvised public hangouts, community gardens, but also to the temporary protest settlements of the so-called ‘movement of the squares’ of 2011. As a variant thereof, housing activists, architects and scholars are increasingly referring to the ‘housing commons’, although what is meant by this may differ per author. Some use the term simply to describe the rise of co-housing initiatives, others use it more ambitiously as a kind of conceptual horizon of what a public housing model for the 21st century could, or should, look like: namely, an network of radically democratic and citizen-controlled housing projects. There are also those who use the term to describe experimental forms of non-hierarchical, egalitarian and participatory communal life at the micro level – “living-in-common” –, with the underlying idea that such a form of commoning in the domestic sphere can “prefigure” larger societal changes. And there are those use the concept of the commons to reimagine the existing social housing system as a form of decentralized collective property beyond the market and the state.
What this indicates is that the definitions of the housing commons differ widely, but also that these definitions spring from very different positions. The discussion about housing commons is bringing another discussion back to the foreground: the discussion about scale and organization of housing systems. From a socialist or social-democratic logic, the solution to the housing crisis is often sought in large-scale state intervention, and it is no surprise that this point of view is often accompanied by a certain nostalgia for the vigorous “municipal socialism” of interwar Vienna (“Red Vienna”) or Amsterdam (“the Mecca of Housing”). Echoes of this are currently reverberating in the election manifestos of the left-wing parties in Amsterdam. But centralist housing policies, based on top-down planning and infinite space for urban expansion, have historically always received criticism from the Marxist side (“Mass-housing stems from social democratic reformism and pacification politics”) and from the anarchist side (“Mass-housing alienates and deprives residents of the possibility of self-determination and self-government”). On the other hand, advocates of a large-scale and centralist housing system point to the painful similarity between the rise of alternative, small-scale forms of housing and neo-liberal fantasies about the ‘Big Society’ or ‘Participatory Society’. It is a credit to the discussion on the housing commons, that it has led to a focus on such fundamental questions and oppositions within the housing struggle. What are we actually striving for: a democratic reboot of the existing centrally organised public housing system? Or an archipelago of radically egalitarian communities? In what follows, I would like to offer a few personal reflections on this discussion, against the background of the broader struggle for affordable housing in Amsterdam and elsewhere.
First of all, there is a practical issue. The idea that the creation of new housing commons is inversely proportional to the dismantling of the old public facilities seems to me to be a case of wishful thinking. In theory, the 2015 Dutch Housing Act, which is disastrous in most other respects, opened up new possibilities for citizens to initiate self-organized cohousing projects. But unfortunately, there’s a huge gap between theory and praxis. The rules are often unclear, the involved parties (municipalities, housing corporations, developers) not always willing to cooperate, and banks are hesitant to provide the necessary capital. And although some very important initiatives have been launched in recent years, it is also necessary to reflect on the fact that many have been nipped in the bud, or have only been implemented in a diluted form.
In theory, it is all too simple: housing corporations have large chunks of property that they need to sell in order to comply with national and European neoliberal legislation. On the other hand, it is increasingly the case that collectives of tenants present themselves as a interested party to acquire a property listed for sale—often the building they occupy—in order to safeguard it as social property and ensure its affordability. But time and again housing corporations show little willingness to take bids from residents’ collectives seriously, because they know that they can expect a much higher bid from an investment fund.[2] Indeed, investment funds are salivating over the prospect of transferring social housing to an explosive private rental market after purchase of a building. Such ‘worst cases’ need to be taken into consideration, because they reveal that a great deal needs to be done before cooperatives can offer a viable, affordable and accessible alternative to a housing market that is too expensive and a public housing sector does not function properly.
Secondly, I see little point in the current fetishisation of small-scale initiatives. Small-scale-ism is not a sacred principle. Yes, next generation co-housing initiatives can act as an incubator for new forms of collective life and political action. But the ultimate challenge is to invent larger, more robust structures to link and empower small-scale initiatives. This will require a form of upscaling that is not yet possible. What worries me is the coverage rate, so to speak, of the new cooperative-based, grassroots housing schemes. Housing cooperatives—and this is what they have in common with the numerous health insurance, co-working and energy cooperatives that have been established since the crisis—tend to reproduce existing networks, as their recruitment often takes place via informal channels. You know someone, and that person invites you to partake. Needless to say, these are often networks of highly educated, young people with considerable social capital.
Thirdly, we must do away with the idea that co-housing experiments by definition have a beneficial effect on the broader housing struggle.[3] In the best cases, that is true, but in the worst cases, these initiatives are only depoliticized enclaves of residents who have “bought themselves free” and now, above all, want to be left alone. Such projects have no added value for the broader ‘struggle for the city’, precisely because they are not reproductive. I agree with Stuart Hodkinson that we “should ensure that these new spaces of commons actively support existing housing commons and undermine enclosure and accumulation”.[4] Connection therefore seems to me to be a crucial next step, and there are various approaches at home and abroad that could serve as examples.
The crucial question is of course: will cohousing remain the middle class facility that it is today, or can it develop into a valid alternative to state-controlled social housing? Not any time soon, I suspect."
Lukas Peter: From public housing to housing commons
Source, Book: Democracy, Markets and the Commons; Chapter 7: The Role of the State in a Commons-Creating Society]]
Lukas Peter:
"In general, public housing is provided for by the state for people in need, which is often interpreted to mean people with low incomes. To understand the problems of public housing, let us begin with the more commonplace criticisms of this kind of state provision.
Proponents of economic liberalism often criticize the provision of public housing because it supposedly distorts the self-regulating mechanism of the market.
While this might be true, it is also the intention of public housing to provide housing to people who, owing the discrepancy between their low wages and the high rents of a home, could otherwise not afford a home on the ‘free’ market. If we value the satisfaction of needs over the functioning of unregulated market processes, then we can rather easily discard this criticism. Another more relevant criticism of public housing for our discussion here lies in an assumption I have mentioned several times already: that state services are uniform and unresponsive to individual needs and particular contexts. Although this may be true, one can say, conversely, that unregulated market processes are also unresponsive to individuals in need. While markets cater to those with more purchasing power, the state caters to those with less – the market as well as the state each being uniform and unresponsive in their own profit-oriented or bureaucratic manner. Aside from this common criticism, we must also acknowledge the concentration of poverty and, in turn, criminality, that results from both housing markets and more generally, misguided urban planning (Goering et al. 1997; Hui et al. 2015; Freedman/McGavock 2015).
I would say that the answer to these problems characteristic of property-owning democracy would be to provide people with housing capital so as to enable people to buy and design their own homes wherever they want. All citizens would thus become independent homeowners. Yet some problems arise from this independent housing model, such as suburban sprawl, long travel distances from home to work and the increased dependency on automobiles, to name just a few (Williamson 2010). Another problem is, however, the explosion of the cost of housing through real-estate speculation, which would be increased due to the provision of capital for all citizens. The ‘neoliberal’ and anti-egalitarian interpretation of a homeowner property-owning democracy has been realized since the 1980s in the USA, Britain and many other European countries by deregulating the banking sector and systematically keeping interest rates low, thereby enticing people with low wages to buy houses that they could not afford in the long run. This “privatized Keynesianism” (Crouch 2009) led to a run on real estate, which created a property bubble and, ultimately, the financial crisis of 2007/8 (Howell 1984; Streeck 2013; Levitin/Wachter 2012; Jackson 2012: 47).
What, then, are alternatives to the problems of uniformity, urban sprawl, poverty and speculation? These problems are obviously very complex and cannot be settled with simple solutions. Yet I believe that the systemic and processoriented approach of commons could provide us with insights to fix at least some of these problems. So, what would a commons approach to the housing question look like? As I have emphasized, commons should not be understood as particular entities (e.g. public housing), but as a systemic and process-oriented approach to creating common goods. In the case of public housing, this implies, first and foremost, the integration of potentially affected people into the development and design of a housing complex, a residential area or an entire neighborhood. Certain housing cooperatives are already developed in this way. The future inhabitants apply for an apartment, for example, before the complex is built instead of after. They are – or should be – able to express their various needs and negotiate how these can be accommodated within the existing financial and ecological budget. In some cases of public housing, lack of funding is a major problem, and one that leads to uniformity and ‘ghettoization’. I do not believe, however, that a lack of funds per se must necessarily lead to these problems. The problem of ‘ghettoization’ could, for example, be rather easily alleviated by building in the centers of cities, which would mean that city planning would not be left to the planning of real estate speculators and unregulated market forces.
In turn, while it is often assumed that a lack of funds necessarily leads to uniform administration and provision, the integration of prospective dwellers into the development and design of such a complex enables people to explore the existing possibilities within whatever ecological and financial limits are agreed upon. And where money is lacking, it should be possible for people to literally determine and shape their living conditions with their own hands. Moreover, given a systemic approach, the layout of a housing commons would also provide various spaces for people to come into contact with each other and develop their living spaces not just before the building process, but also while they live there. This could include shared spaces for shared goods (shared tools and household appliances, a repair workshop, shared cars etc.), but also shared gardens, playgrounds and wild green areas, or possibly even a weekly local market and a café. These examples might sound trivial, but my main point is that the environment would never be entirely brought to completion but always open to the continual and evolutionary process of co-creation that can be adapted and developed by the different people that live in such environments.
The belief that the management of such a diverse and creatively assembled habitat would be impossible for the state to manage is, to a certain extent, correct. It would be difficult and costly for state authorities to administer such selforganized groups.That is one reason why governments often realize uniform goods with uniform rules. But this is where Elinor Ostrom’s ideas about commons management come in: the costs of management can be significantly reduced while increasing the robustness of the institutional structure of an ecologically diverse resource system by enabling (and requiring) the dwellers to democratically manage their own commons, in this case their housing. This would necessitate that both institutional and physical space for public deliberation are provided for and maintained. Responsibilities would be devolved and delegated to different subgroups for different resources, goods and services. More importantly, these groups would provide the institutional space needed so that problems can be voiced and conflicts resolved: such groups would maintain the mutual monitoring and graduated sanctioning necessary to reproduce commons on different levels. They would also provide the state with information for the background administration and support of housing commons. But would everyone have to participate in these deliberations and administrative processes? The right to dwell in such a housing commons could be made contingent on the inhabitant’s committing to fulfill certain basic duties that would go beyond the mere compliance with basic rules. These could include minimal participation in the co-management and reproduction of the housing commons. But the precise nature of these commitments would have to be defined by the inhabitants themselves. Another question that arises in this discussion is whether housing would be provided free of charge and whether the state or the residents would be the proprietors of the housing commons.This is a central question that distinguishes housing commons from public housing. Simply put, a central feature of commons is that the people who use the resource system also manage it. Ideally, the people who use the common also collectively own it in the form of common property or a trust. I suggest that a housing commons could be arranged in the following manner: the land could be owned by the state in the form of a Community Land Trust. The Community Land Trust manages the land on behalf of the people of the village or the city and leases the land to the residence of the housing complex at affordable prices. The Community Land Trust would be comprised of politicians, experts, residents and other people from the broader community. The housing complex would then be owned as a cooperative by the people who live there (Conaty/Bollier 2014: 14-16; Lewis/Conaty 2012: 85-110). They would have to buy themselves into the cooperative. Yet, as numerous examples of housing cooperatives and other cooperative enterprises demonstrate, this amount will not be extremely high because the prices for real estate will not be driven up by speculation, and because the costs of housing will be shared by the many residents. For those who lack the necessary funds, there could be other means of accessing this capital – hopefully without falling into debt traps. To avoid this problem of debt, it is also imaginable that citizens would be provided with housing commons coupons of a certain value (e.g. $20,000) at the age of 18 years in order for them to become a member of a housing commons project. If the cooperative share exceeds this amount, the individual would have to pay the difference. But these are only some ideas of what the specific arrangement might look like. The important point, then, is that people have actual stakes in the housing commons that they live in. This not only cultivates responsibility for the management and maintenance of the commons, but also frees the inhabitants from the arbitrary interference of external owners such as the state or private investors.
Now, let us analyze the role of the state in such a housing commons scheme. According to my sketch above, its role should be conceptualized as providing housing commons with administrative and institutional support. The function of the state is to ‘be there’ for the commoners: to initiate and, in certain cases, to support the processes of self-governance, to aid the realization of certain large-scale projects and, most importantly, to democratically develop urban and regional planning policies that provide adequate land for housing commons. The state would, therefore, not manage people and their habitats, but would rather provide people with the opportunity to democratically manage their own lives and habitats. Coercive power would not be exercised by the state itself in the form of a monopoly, but would provide citizens with the necessary opportunities and powers with which to democratically govern their own habitats. Here, the state is not understood as an authoritarian leviathan, but rather as a partner in realizing the democratic and interdependent freedom of its citizens.
Having discussed the idea of a housing commons, let us now turn to the question of how the public provision of health care can be conceptualized as and transformed into a common."