04021 Co-housing, Housing Cooperatives, and other forms of Collaborative Housing

Equity. Equality. Self-help. Democracy. Solidarity. These are the guiding values upon which the modern cooperative movement is founded and the basis for the organization of every cooperative enterprise in the world today. Cooperative Housing Toolbox, Northcountry Cooperative Foundation.

Collaborative living is an important feature of urban living. While many people have families of adoption or blood to live with, others do not. Yet, living alone is not for everyone.

Collaborative living works with a variety of structures. Co-housing, Housing Cooperatives, and Casual Roommates are three alternative forms of housing that work for many people.

Co-Housing

The Co-housing Association of the United States http://www.cohousing.org says there are six distinguishing characteristics of co-housing that differentiate it from other forms of collaborative housing:

Residents participate in the design process.
Design fosters neighborhood identity and activities.
Some shared/common facilities. While each family has its own family apartment or house with all the rooms of a regular apartment or house, a co-housing community has community facilities, such as a large kitchen, dining and recreational areas, storage and work areas etc.
Residents manage their own communities rather than using outside hired managers.
Non-hierarchal structure and decision making process.
Not a shared community economy. Co-housing is not a commune, or an intentional community where residents share expenses and pool income. People have their own jobs and businesses and keep their own finances separate from the community and the other members.

Housing Cooperative

With a housing cooperative, the members organize a cooperative, a business structure governed on the basis of one member, one share, one vote. The housing cooperative owns the property. The members receive a title to live there in a specific unit based on their ownership of a share in the cooperative. They are democratically owned and governed by volunteer boards elected by the members.

The form that a housing cooperative may take is as varied as the needs of its members. The coop may not actually own any property, but instead lease it from someone else. An estimated 1.2 million households in the US live in a housing cooperative. Some of the common types of housing cooperatives are:

Market-rate cooperatives. Members can sell their shares for “whatever the market will bear.”

Limited equity cooperatives. There is a limit on the resale value of the shares. The purpose of such cooperatives is to make home ownership available to people of limited means. Nonprofit organizations often start them with government assistance. They want to encourage long term occupancy and to discourage speculation.

Manufactured Housing Cooperatives. Most municipalities discriminate against owners of manufactured housing (a/k/a mobile homes, or trailer houses) by greatly restricting where they can locate. This can put the owners of mobile homes at the mercy of a limited group of landowners. A better way is for the mobile home owners to buy land and operate as a housing cooperative for mobile homes, where each member receives a space for their mobile home.

Student Housing Cooperatives. Many colleges and universities have dormitory-like student housing cooperatives close to their campuses to provide affordable housing to students.

Leasehold Cooperative. This type of business organization acquires property by lease, sometimes with an option to buy, and then operates as any other housing cooperative.

Senior housing cooperatives. An increasing number of housing cooperatives cater to seniors and may offer assisted living services.

Other forms of collaborative housing

Roommates. Two or more people living together and sharing expenses. This is the most casual form of collaborative housing.

A Boarding house is a commercial relationship that offers room and board to people who are not related or involved with a household relationship with the landlord. Boarding houses, once upon a time a common feature of urban life, are hard to find in this era. Given the need for housing and community, opening a boarding house could be a paying proposition in the modern world.

Intentional Communities take collaborative housing a step further and the members pool property, expenses, and incomes. They may have an ideological or religious component to their mission. They include traditional monasteries and convents of world religions as well as ecovillages and other developments motivated by secular ideals.

Single Room Occupancy Hotels. This is not collaborative living per se. It is an important form of urban living that unfortunately is increasingly scarce. It has always been the housing of last resort before homelessness. The decline in the availability of single room occupancy hotel rooms tracks the increase in homelessness in many areas. One or two tenants occupy each SRO hotel room. Often the residents share bathrooms and kitchens, although some SROs have private baths and kitchenettes.

Assisted Living Centers. An assisted living center is an organized collaborative living development for seniors that offers some degree of life assistance. They are not a nursing home. They aren’t independent living either.

Nursing Homes provide residential care to people who because of illness or disability cannot live on their own and have no one to care for them, or their illness or disability is so great family and friends cannot care for them at home.

Dormitories are organized living situations located on the campuses of colleges and universities. Many schools require freshmen who do not live in the area with their families to live in school dormitories. Dormitories are often an energy efficient method of housing.