Housing Cooperative

Definitions

1. Mira Luna:

"Housing cooperatives are defined primarily by their legal structure: coop members own the housing collectively through shares in an organization, rather than individually, as with a condo. Residents also govern the housing democratically, either directly or through elected representatives. Not just for students, coops can be home to support groups of low income families, artists, elderly, disabled, and people with a common purpose. Over 1.5 million homes in the US are part of a cooperative housing organization." (http://shareable.net/blog/how-to-start-a-housing-coop)

2.

"Housing Cooperatives are houses or apartment complexes that are owned and democratically controlled by their residents. Members of “limited equity housing coops” purchase a share of the coop and, upon leaving, sell that share back to the coop at the same price they originally paid. This de-links the value of housing from the capitalist market, allowing the coop to remain affordable."

"A housing cooperative is a legal entity—usually a corporation—that owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings. (This is one type of housing tenure.) Each shareholder in the legal entity is granted the right to occupy one housing unit, sometimes subject to an occupancy agreement, which is similar to a lease. The occupancy agreement specifies the co-op's rules. Cooperative is also used to describe a non-share capital co-op model in which fee-paying members obtain the right to occupy a bedroom and share the communal resources of a house that is owned by a cooperative organization. Such is the case with student cooperatives in some college neighborhoods in the United States."

Typologies

Housing Cooperatives as organizations express themselves in a number of different ways.

The typologies listed here are very general and not every housing cooperative fits into each or any of them.

Housing tenure

Housing cooperatives differ by how the occupant makes the financial and legal agreement for accessing the use of the property. In a limited equity housing cooperative the residents may be mutual owners but the ownership they enjoy has little marke value. They are, in effect, renters, though the residents often enjoy a great deal more control over their residence. In a full equity cooperative

Orientation towards community

some housing cooperatives are attached to other activities like a Worker Cooperative or a pension plan. In these cases candidates for housing must also be a part of some other plan or system in order to gain access to housing. This typology loosely describes housing cooperatives that are designed to serve the needs of specific populations like singles, elderly, or families with children.

2. Mira Luna:

"There are several different kinds of coops:

• Rental or leasehold coops are democratically run organizations of tenants that equitably share costs of renting or leasing a building owned by someone else. Rental coops may share part of the management responsibility and often have more power collectively than single renters leasing from a conventional landlord. Nonprofits can also buy a building and rent it out to lower income folks who might not be able to afford shares. Sharing a house can offer big savings and can help people avoid foreclosure.

• Market rate coops are houses, apartment buildings or other groups of housing units that are organized under a democratically managed corporation in which residents purchase shares at a market rate. Shares cover the costs of a blanket mortgage, rainy day reserves, maintenance and other operating costs, insurance, tax, etc. Units are resold at market rate.

• Limited- or zero-equity affordable housing coops receive grants and government subsidies to make coop shares more affordable to low-income people. They keep the housing permanently affordable through legal restrictions on the amount of gain on a future sale of the coop share. Often these are organized groups of low-income tenants that agree to collectively buy the building they already rent through a nonprofit, usually a land trust that holds title to the land and takes it off the speculative market. It’s a great way to make permanent gains in the fight against gentrification."

(http://shareable.net/blog/how-to-start-a-housing-coop)

Discussion

Evaluation of Housing Cooperatives

Additional criteria can be used to examine and compare housing cooperatives. In some cases these criteria might constitute a typology in itself, and in most cases these criteria are up to the choice of the community itself, as opposed to being an aspect of the environment.

Freehold (UK)

In the United Kingdom a cooperative that owns a building may have a leasehold, but not the freehold. The leasehold might be for 75 years, more or less, but once it expires, the building and everything else on the property reverts back to the ownership of the council that owns the freehold for the property. This can be an important point for examining the financial arrangements of a UK housing cooperative. Banks are not typically inclined to lend on properties with leaseholds of less than 75 years.

Governance

Depending on your situation you may be interested in evaluating what type of governance is used to manage the day to day operations of the housing cooperative. In some cases the governance may be highly participatory and democratic, or you may find that the board operates in secret and only publishes the minimum of information about the goings-on of meetings.

Cooperation with other groups

Cooperative organizations often adopt the ICA Co-operative Principles. Depending on the cooperative, this may or may not be indicative of how effective the housing cooperative under examination is at working with other cooperatives.

Cooperative principles

Many housing cooperatives may find cause to write and demonstrate exactly how their organization fulfills the ICA Co-operative Principles. This can often be a quick way to get a bird's-eye-view of a cooperatives organization and to compare the organizations intentions with its actions.

Examples

1.

The ArkFab Innovation Foundation in Atlanta, GA is a worker owned appropriate technology development collective. Housing was endowed to the foundation by a private donor. The nonprofit provides the co-housing space as part of their employee's compensation package. This model provides a low-cost opportunity to reduce risks for innovators who wish to work outside of the capitalist system. (http://arkfab.org/)

2.

"A successful limited-equity model is Columbus United Cooperative, a 21-unit apartment building in San Francisco. The San Francisco Community Land Trust (SFCLT) worked closely with the low-income, Chinese-American family tenants who were fighting eviction and demolition. With public subsidy, tenants purchased their units as part of a coop for little more than their controlled rent in an area where home ownership is half the national average due to cost. In Los Angeles, Comunidad Cambria went from a gang war zone and drug supermarket slum to a model of peaceful, affordable cooperative housing with the help of coop housing activist Allan Heskin and several Latina women in the complex. The community rallied to protect its new coop against threats from gangs and drug dealers to burn the building down, remediated a toxic dump in its basement, and created a vibrant community center. Sunwise Coop is a rental cooperative, owned by Solar Community Housing Association, with a mission to provide eco-friendly, low-income housing in Davis, CA. The house uses solar water heating, photovoltaic panels, passive solar design, and composting to reduce their ecological footprint. They also grow their own veggies for shared vegetarian/vegan dinners and raise chickens and bees. Monthly shares or rental costs at affordable housing coops are often half or less of the market cost." (http://shareable.net/blog/how-to-start-a-housing-coop)

More Information

See articles at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative

http://www.coophousing.org/DisplayPage.aspx?id=48

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/jul/29/housing-co-op-affordable-home

References

Internal Links

• Housing Cooperatives (UK)
• Category:Cooperatives on this wiki
• ICA Co-operative Principles

External Links

• Housing Cooperative on Wikipedia