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Housing as a Collective Responsibility

The following resource set is intended to support discussions on the concept of housing as a collective responsibility. This collection began in 2021 while writing up a research project proposal focused on existing collaborative models/approaches for working group for developing housing justice focused approaches to collaborative. Since then, we found enough existing research to transition that working group into a transitional project focued on Retrofitting and Decommodifying Housing.

Contents:

  • Contextualising housing as a collective responsibility
  • Glossaries of key concepts
  • Resources for navigating precarious housing (location specific)
  • Resources for developing community-led approaches to housing
  • Examples of community-focused housing projects
  • Link-dump of further resources

Note: this collection is due for a major update - contributions very welcome!

Contextualising Housing as a Collective Responsibility

Glossaries of Key Concepts

  • Dwelling: "A dwelling is a structure which is intended to have people live in it. Private dwellings can take a number of very different types or forms, such as being a detached house, apartment, unit or town house, and can also include a caravan, houseboat, tent, a residence attached to an office or rooms above a shop. Non-private dwellings include places that provide communal accommodation such as aged care and retirement villages with supported nursing care."

Housing Security

  • Housing security refers to “the extent to which an individual's customary access to housing of reasonable quality is secure” (Frederick et al., 2014). According to a AHURI report ‘Housing insecurity and precarious living: an Australian exploration’ (2008), “housing security can be improved by: not moving unless this is a choice; improving housing stability; enabling privacy both within and outside the home; feeling safe within and outside the home; feeling a sense of belonging; and enjoying a reasonable level of physical comfort”, also see:Housing Affordability Stress(HAS)
  • Precarious housing: a situation where housing is only available at a high costs relative to income (i.e., is not affordable), is insecure (e.g., of a tenure type which is subject to forced moves); and/or is unsuitable (e.g., overcrowded, unsafe, poorly located, etc.,) (source: a VicHealth research synthesis examining the relationship between housing and health, 2011/2015)

Community-led collaborative housing

  • Community-led housing approaches: approaches that seek to build housing options that contribute to the resilience of communities by reducing the risk of precarious housing for all. This includes housing projects that are developed and/or managed in through governance practices that are overseen by people who live in the locality and/or are directly impacted by housing practices within the area. (see: Crabtree-Hayes 2023)

  • Collaborative housing: "a modality of dwelling that meets three criteria: (a) a complex form of ownership that surpasses solely individual or state property, and that includes some degree of collective or cooperative tenure; (b) collective (self ) management involving the dwellers in the estate; © and an architectural design that promotes everyday sharing of space" (Griffith et al. 2022, p.2, as quoted in Crabtree-Hayes 2023, p.12)

  • Collective Housing: an approach to housing where a opt-in group of people collaborate on physical housing forms that display a degree of collectivism in the built form, such that individual spaces that are complemented by shared space. Note that this is distinct from housing-justice colletives that focus on the more broader level of improving access to housing, which may support collective housing and other forms of collaborative housing as a tactic in this broader goal.

  • Stewardship: the concept of stewardship can be realised through several legal structures that, while varying across legal jurisdiction, each ensures that the entity's independence and purpose is protected over the long-term by separating economic and voting rights. Stewardship legal structures include the ‘Golden Share’, ‘Single Foundation’; ‘Trust Foundation Two-entity Model’; ‘Trust partnership’. These stewardship structures differ from other purpose-driven ownership structures. For example, unlike B-corps, which commit a company to its purpose, steward-ownership changes the fundamental power structure by decommodifying corporate control to ensure long-term independence. Likewise, while stewardship structures can be cooperatives, the stewardship structure separates economic and voting rights (meaning that the cooperative can not vote to sell). And, in contrast to inheritance-based ownership, successive stewards are selected based on ability and values-alignment. Examples of stewardship of property in Australia include the EVA ‘Collective Stewardship’ model

  • Community Land Trusts (CLTs): nonprofit entities dedicated to maintaining community control of real property outside conventional, speculative land and housing markets. Features of CLTs vary by country and may serve various ends – including the stewardship of green space, and the provision of permanently affordable housing for low-income individuals and families. For an overview see AHURI's intro. For an example in Victoria, see Gounded. Also see: Enabling Community Landtrusts in Australia and Australian Community Land Trust Network.

  • Housing Cooperatives: A housing cooperative is typically a community of people who voluntarily work together to meet their common need for affordable, sustainable housing. Members actively participate in the management of the housing co-operative, including attending meetings and participating in the management and everyday running of the co-operative. Housing cooperatives can operate under a number of different legal structures, including forms of leasing and ownership. Note that housing co-opperatives are typically a legal entity that operates under the cooperative legal framework at the regional or national level and constituted of member-based organisations holding title to housing stock. This is consistent with the broader practice of forming cooperatives - i.e., legal structures for cooperation that have generally developed around groups of people who do not have fair access to political and economic power. By joining together as a co-operative, members combined their social, financial and/or political clout to obtain a more socially just outcome against the odds. Co-operatives are governed by Seven International Co-operative Principles which guides their equitable conduct. In Australia, cooperatives are registered by the states and territories under nationally consistent legislation (Co-operative National Law). There are lots of different shared equity-models for housing co-operatives (e.g., group equity, mixed-equity, limited-equity, etc.,. See: * 1301.0 - ABS Year Book Australia, 2012: Regulation of Co-Operatives in Australia. Note: Limited (or zero) equity housing cooperatives: "Housing cooperatives with contracts or covenants containing restrictions on resale values, which ensure that housing remains affordable into the future. Usually residents collectively own the building, rather than each member owning their own flat or apartment" (Monk and Whitehead 2010)

  • Co-housing: individually-owned homes located within a property that includes some shared facilities (these include a wide range of structural and governance practices that are intended to enable greater levels of inter-household interaction). For context, "initially conceived from a desire to build housing that enabled greater levels of inter-household interaction… Cohousing can be delivered through a variety of organisational and tenure forms and may or may not address affordability; however, as with ecovillages, the majority are delivered as market-rate homes that due to their high amenity and high quality design, can tend to be relatively elite, expensive, and exclusive products. Cohousing projects can and do exist as various forms of housing co-operative, although other organisational forms and titling systems are also used" (Crabtree-Hayes 2023, p.9).

  • Intentional communities: "Intentional communities are housing developments designed, built, and/or occupied by groups of people who have decided to live in some form of community, with varying degrees of sharing of property title, living arrangements, activities, and physical spaces. Often, they focus on a specific suite of lifestyle and living objectives, such as low environmental impact, which forms the basis of the group’s intentionality… articulated through a range of appropriate tenure, design, organisational, and property title arrangements."(Crabtree-Hayes 2023, p.18).

  • Shared Equity Homeownership approaches: "Davis (2006, p. 3) refers to shared equity homeownership as that which focuses on the three principles of: the owner-occupancy of residential property; the fair allocation of equity between one generation of lower-income homeowners and another; and the sharing of rights, responsibilities, and benefits of residential property between individual homeowners and another party representing the interests of a larger community." (Crabtree-Hayes 2023, p.20). Note that this term is used in ways distinct from both more specific uses of shared ownership (where residents own part-equity in a house while paying rent on the rest to a community-led housing association or community land trust) and non-community-led shared equity (where the household and an external housing provider share equity, with each equity component based on market value and residents are not involved in the design, construction, development, or collective governance of the homes. Resident co-owners can sell their proportion of the property at market value to the equity partner who uses the returned equity to partner with another buyer, such as KeyStart Shared Ownership Services).

Overlapping terms for commercial or state-run approaches to housing:

  • Housing associations: "A not-for-profit housing provider that is regulated by a government agency" (Monk and Whitehead 2010)

  • Co-living design: used primarily in the for-profit housing sector to refer to medium- to high-density housing that take inspiration from the design orientation of cohousing (to provide compact individual housing units alongside shared spaces),yet do not involve residents in the design or governance processes.

Resources:

Resources for navigating precarious housing within the social/legal/economic context of systems set up by the Federal Government of Australia:

…within context of the systems set up by the State of Victoria:

Resources for navigating legal/financial barriers to collaborative housing

Services & Guides

Networks for supporting community-led housing experiments

Housing Experiments & Activism

Housing co-operative networks

Examples of Community-Focused Housing Projects

Example from Australia

  • Commonground "an intentional community and not-for-profit social enterprise that has been supporting social justice, environmental, disadvantaged and community groups since 1984" is an intentional social change community that also functions as a social change resource service
  • Victoria Street Collective, purchaced land in 2018 and the housing/land development aiming to complete in 2023 (supported by PropertyCollectives.
  • Wesrwyk Eco-village, Bunswick West
  • Urban Coup: Urban Coup is an initiative of a group of Melbournians with a shared vision of creating not just housing, but community, who have taken a 14+ year journey to create an inner urban co-housing development in Melbourne. Contact: info@urbancoup.org
  • United Housing Co-operative - see interview on 3CR, United in Housing - Cooperatives and the Big Housing Build
  • Murundaka: an all-rental, housing co-operative (members of Earth Common Equity Rental Cooperative and the Common Equity Housing program).
  • Moora Moora co-operative - a community living together intentionally since 1974 (currently made up of about 50 adults and 20 children) and in the process of permanently conserving and protecting our land with a Trust for Nature covenant.
  • Mannawood Community Land Trust - previously known as Bunjil Community, this is an Ecovillage Cohousing project currently being developed as a pilot project by The Global Foundation for Sustainable Communities and the Global Standards described by GIDIFA (specialised UN agency) with capacity for 625 adult members, 225 child Members, and 95 Non-Member Residents.
  • The Clarke street Collective - 2014, the 7 member collective established in 2014; 2016, secure the permits to build seven 3-4 bedroom triple-storey townhouses; 2017, construction commenced; 2018 (late), construction completed at a cost circa 1.05m per house (and valued of 1.2m).
  • Brougham Street Cohousing - "an intergenerational housing project where the residents are the developers" that began in 2021.
  • Narara Eco Village, located on the Central Coast of NSW
  • Murry Agrihood- "regenerating unused or degraded land in and around Albury Wodonga to grow food permaculture/organic/syntropic style via microenterprises under a cooperative banner."
  • Northcote Rental Housing Co-operative is one of seven rental co-operative in Victoria. It has operated since 1983 and now functions within the inner north western area of metropolitan Melbourne "an inclusive, member-governed Co-operative that provides quality affordable homes for current and future members on low to moderate incomes".
  • CHIA supported housing co-operatives in Victoria

International examples

  • Radical Roots - with a focus on building a future where there are 'homes without landlords and work without bosses' for grassroots control and economic revolution through co-operation
  • The Kotti & Co tenants’ initiative in Berlin
  • Mondragon - the outcome of a cooperative business project launched in 1956 in Spain, Mondragon is now a massive cooperative ecosystem with world-wide operations.
  • Spreefeld Berlin - a cooperative created to democratically build and manage mixed-use housing projects (running since 2011).
  • Tamera - In Tamara, Portugal, the community started in 1978 with a small group, now ~200 people who are working towards autonomous decentralized models for a post-capitalist world.
  • Christiania - an squat that's survived 50yrs
  • San Jose Boundary Balutakay Neighborhood Association - with help from the Homeless People’s Federation Philippines, two groups came together, registered themselves as an association, negotiated to buy the farmland cheaply and then planned and built new houses for themselves, using a variety of cost saving techniques.
  • Familia Feliz a decentralized living community with common economy - the community does not dictate where a member should live or that all members have to live in one place at all times. Currently including spaces in Spain and Germany, our community life is based on a shared economy, decisions by consensus, veto for each and solidarity with each member.
  • La Balma located in Barcelona, Spain, La Bama is a heterogeneous and intergenerational group made of 33 people grouped in 19 dwelling units. The project began in autumn 2016 and in spring 2021 the building was finished and members moved ib. La Balma is a project of the housing cooperative Sostre Cívic, that promotes, facilitates and guides several projects. It aims to ensure collective property and the promotion of the grant of use housing cooperative model.
  • Co-Operation Housing - a not for profit company supporting housing co-operative in Western Australia.
  • Queenstown Lakes Community Housing Trust (NZ) - see context in media article by Vic Crockford (2022)
  • Village Kit a project aimed at providing "accessible building blocks for abundant living"
  • The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Collective, also see their documents

Studies of Housing Cooperatives at a Systems Level

"While the activist groups tackled immedidate housing problems, the cooperatives sought a more radical answer to the housing crisis by developing alternative noncommodifable housing models distinct from existing private- and public-sector ones"

Cases studies of cooperatives in Barcelona that "entered into a legal agreement with the municiplality to transfer 'suface righ' (dret de superficie): a leasehold agreement giving the cooperative the right to build on public land and use the building for a period of 75 years (and an option to extend this by a further 15 years) after which both land and building are returned to the municipality. The legal relationship between the cooperative who ones the building and the dwellers is defined by a 'grant of use (cessio d' us) of the dwellings and common areas, which also includes a clause prohibiting property speculation".

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tags: housing resource-sets collaborative-practices

Date created: 2021
Version: in-progress draft, Version 2.2 (2024)

Attribution: created by E. T. Smith on unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people.

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E. T. Smith
I am a researcher and resource curator using this space to draft and share early-versions of projects. For context, see: https://hackmd.io/@Teq/Bio
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