Real Estate Property Hacking

Typology

(from the Encommuns interview with Maxime Zait, co-founder of Communa)

* Sébastien Broca – Corinne Vercher-Chaptal: This brings us to the question of how to articulate the world of commons and public authorities.

Maxime Zaït: That’s exactly what interests me: finding the right articulation to produce effective public policies at the interface between commons practices and institutional practices; getting these two sets of interests—which should in fact align—to converge. Commons exist in a world governed by property, by the “proprietary order.”

Faced with this, a first option is squatting, often as a way of waging war on property. That happens, and it will continue to happen, even though we can expect increasing repression. Squatting is often ideologically opposed to property, as with the militant artists we discussed earlier, but sometimes it is simply because people have no other choice: migrant squats, for example, are not about waging war on property—people there would be happy not to care about that at all. This anti-property model has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s free, you learn lots of things, you build solidarity networks. But at some point, the blowback comes: you’re thrown out, and in the end owners almost always win. There are counterexamples like the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, but once the State stops sending the police, it still asks people to fit into an institutional box. The question then is: which one?

A second option is what I call the ostrich technique, which is, in some sense, what temporary occupation does. We put property “between brackets” for a time. During that time, there is no rent demand. Owners allow the use of their property, and we can center our attention on usage. We do things that depart somewhat from traditional property-based economic models, we experiment, but at some point the proprietary order returns and demands “real” projects with “real” money, “real” rents, etc. At that moment, either we say we’ve done some great work for a time and leave, or we decide to stay and then we must buy, accepting that we’re re-entering the property regime.

This leads to a third category: we are no longer against property, nor merely putting it in brackets; we are hacking property. We try to do a kind of jiu-jitsu with property, turning it against itself. This is what solidarity-based real estate companies, the Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germany, housing cooperatives, and Community Land Trusts do. We can outline a panorama of these different economic and legal approaches, which may be more or less effective and scalable. This is what fascinates me: guaranteeing the social function of property, forever.

* Sébastien Broca – Corinne Vercher-Chaptal: Could you elaborate on the different instruments that exist within this third model of property hacking?

Maxime Zaït: The first that impressed me were the creators of the Mietshäuser Syndikat in Freiburg, Germany. These were squatters in a squatted neighborhood who decided to buy their building because it wasn’t very expensive. At first they were insulted and called “social traitors.” Twenty years later, they are the only ones left in the neighborhood. Everyone else has been evicted, and everything else has been gentrified, except their site, which has remained essentially the same. They used corporate law. They created a classic private company (a limited liability company) with two shareholders: an association composed of resident members and a structure that brings together all the residents’ associations within this network, the Mietshäuser Syndikat. The residents’ association is responsible for everything: raising money, developing the project, managing it, etc. The only moment when the other shareholder, the Mietshäuser Syndikat, intervenes is when there is a plan to sell. At that point, because it has 50% of the company’s shares, it systematically blocks any resale project. This is a way of hacking a quintessentially capitalist tool—limited liability companies—to fight the rise in land prices.

* Sébastien Broca – Corinne Vercher-Chaptal: Is this an isolated example or does it exist elsewhere?

Maxime Zaït: There are, I believe, 194 buildings in Germany that belong to the Mietshäuser Syndikat network. The model has spread to Austria and Switzerland. In France, there is Le Clip, which works in the same way but is much smaller, with around ten sites. Now they want to open one in Belgium, so it’s a model that works and is spreading, even if it has its own weaknesses.

Another model is that of Community Land Trusts. It emerged among African-American activists during segregation, who were fighting for civil rights. They were being evicted by white landlords who did not want activists as tenants. These activists traveled to India and also to kibbutzim, and adapted the land–building separation model in the United States by creating the first Community Land Trusts. The land remains owned by a trust or a foundation that can never sell it and whose governance is broad enough to guarantee this. The buildings, however, belong to private individuals or cooperatives. This model, which became very important in the United States and later in the United Kingdom, is now spreading across continental Europe, especially in Belgium, where we are quite advanced.

This in turn inspired the French OFS (Offices of Solidarity-based Land), which drew on what was happening in Belgium, albeit in a very Jacobin version where the State runs the OFS. In Belgium and the Anglo-Saxon world, Community Land Trusts are defined by tripartite governance that brings together public authorities, citizens, and residents. In France, only public authorities are involved. So it’s a very statist version, but still belongs to this jiu-jitsu category, where we use property against itself. However, in this French version, we do not prevent a Thatcher-style “right to buy,” which would allow public authorities, in theory, to privatize all public housing stock overnight.

Then there are housing cooperatives, which I find particularly interesting. Inspired by the Swiss model, which also exists in Vienna, Germany, and the Nordic countries, they create a system where residents are simultaneously owners and tenants—or neither owners nor tenants. They are shareholder-members of a cooperative, which gives them the right to rent a home from that cooperative. They pay cost-based rents that do not increase over time, because they have no interest in raising their own rents. And when they leave, they recover the shares they initially invested, without capital gains. These models often also promote collective management, with shared spaces, a common laundry room, a community room, a shared kitchen, even a climbing wall. In Switzerland, I’ve seen amazing projects where entire neighborhoods are built cooperatively. In Zurich, cooperatives account for almost 30% of the housing stock.

* Sébastien Broca – Corinne Vercher-Chaptal: That’s a lot, especially in a very prosperous city.

Maxime Zaït: Yes, and we can see this as an illustration of the need to normalize commons—not in the sense of stripping them of their militant dimension or their transformative ambition, but in the sense that they no longer stand out. I like the idea that in a row of three houses, two are cooperatives and you wouldn’t know from the outside, because they are for everyone. Today, we are too often caught up in discussions focused on aesthetics. We judge the militant solidity or transformative capacity of a space based on aesthetic codes, whereas I think it’s more interesting for everyone to want to spend time there, to live there, without needing to be militants or activists. That does not mean activist spaces are not valuable—on the contrary. But we cannot wait for the entire population to become activists before commons can take up space.

* Sébastien Broca – Corinne Vercher-Chaptal: That’s interesting because places like Les Grands Voisins or Césure in Paris do have a distinctive aesthetic, and one might wonder to what extent that is necessary.

Maxime Zaït: Different population groups want their own spaces, and it’s great that they exist; I go there myself and enjoy them. But I’d like aesthetics not to be a barrier to going to a place or not.

* Sébastien Broca – Corinne Vercher-Chaptal: Indeed, the aesthetic chosen by certain places is so marked by cultural bourgeois codes that it can be excluding for some publics.

Maxime Zaït: These are discussions we had at one point when we were redesigning one of our sites and opening a café. I asked a friend of mine who was undocumented, who lived with us in the building and had been heavily involved in the project for a long time, what he imagined. He replied: “We paint everything white, put in neon lights and two flat screens so we can watch football.” I said: “Mate, no way!” And that’s when the penny dropped for me. I was bringing in a whole aesthetic that would not work in a place like that, and he was making fun of us, saying the pallet-furniture look was a “hobo style”… He wanted the space to be beautiful, clean, a marker of upward social mobility. What’s interesting is that our sites bring together two types of marginalized people: those marginalized by the system who want to enter it, and those who are comfortable in the system and want to get out. These are the two types of public we encounter in our spaces and also in the squats I mentioned earlier."