Alternative Housing
Alternative housing refers to housing approaches that challenge the dominant neoliberal paradigm, which prioritises growth and profit. The neoliberal approach to housing promotes homeownership under the assumption that owning your home brings higher social status and increased financial security. However, it often leads to more household debt. The shift in norms from renting to homeownership has resulted in a social division where tenants are often seen as second-class citizens, and mass homelessness coexists with rising vacancies in wealthy countries.
Alternative housing approaches seek to prioritise values beyond economic growth, such as togetherness, sustainability, sharing, degrowth, autonomy, and justice. These alternatives challenge existing property relations, such as private property, and promote other models such as common property. Strategies such as housing cooperatives, squats, cohousing, and housing commons also seek to centralise goals other than profit. Collaborative housing, an umbrella term, refers to housing initiatives involving significant collaboration towards a common purpose.
While many examples of alternative housing exist, scaling up these initiatives to effectively decommodify housing remains a major challenge. One strategy for scaling up is through cooperative networks. For instance, cooperative housing, where ownership is collective rather than individualised, can help prevent housing commodification. When these initiatives form networks of cooperatives, they can provide long-term affordable housing by removing dwellings from the market.
Despite the Netherlands’ long history of alternative living practices (such as woongroepen and squats), its cooperative sector has only recently begun to develop. Currently, the municipality of Amsterdam stands out as the only municipality actively promoting shared ownership as a strategy for achieving decommodified and affordable housing in the long term. By making public land and funds available, Amsterdam aims to expedite this process and establish networks of housing commons. Outside Amsterdam, alternative housing often takes the form of Collectief Particulier Opdrachtgeverschap projects (or CPOs), which are privately owned, self-designed housing units with shared spaces.
While it is one of the most expensive cities in the United States, San Francisco also has numerous initiatives aimed at creating and sustaining long-term affordable housing. One such initiative is the San Francisco Community Land Trust, which purchases properties on the regular housing market to permanently remove them and convert them into (relatively) affordable housing. But while rents remain lower than market rates, they can still be quite high. The city also has several cooperative housing initiatives, where residents own shares in a housing cooperative and have exclusive rights to specific units. To date, however, this approach has not necessarily stopped commodification. This is especially clear in the case of the Midtown Park Apartments, which were originally built as a cooperative housing initiative but were later converted to rental housing.
Through its emphasis on the decommodification of housing, the promotion of alternative housing models often aligns with the goals of radical housing rights groups. In Spain, particularly in Catalonia, the growing strength of the cooperative movement has led to an alliance between the Catalan Tenants’ Union and the cooperative housing developer ‘Sostre Civic’. This alliance explores ways to transform tenant buildings threatened with evictions into cooperative housing, removing them from the private rental market and fostering engaged communities capable of democratically self-managing their living spaces. Politicising vacancy. In The New Urban Ruins (pp. 181-196) has the potential to foster networks of solidarity around housing as a right.
In Greece, the prevalence of small residential properties throughout the twentieth century and the predominant perception of housing as a personal or family matter beyond the realm of politics have constrained the emergence of collaborative housing experiences. However, in response to the ongoing housing crisis, initiatives are emerging in major cities to explore approaches to collective ownership. Drawing on the legacy of social mobilisation in the 2010s around self-management and the commons, these co-habitation initiatives aim to overcome legal and institutional barriers to develop models of collaborative housing suited to the contemporary Greek urban landscape.
REFERENCES
CoHab. (working text). Exploring co-operative housing in Greece.
Ferreri, M. (2021). Politicising vacancy and commoning housing in municipalist Barcelona. In The New Urban Ruins (pp. 181-196). Policy Press.
Griffith, E. J., Jepma, M., & Savini, F. (2022). Beyond collective property: a typology of collaborative housing in Europe. International Journal of Housing Policy, 1-21.
Hodkinson, S. N. (2012). The return of the housing question. Ephemera: theory and politics in organization, 12(4), 423-444.
Lang, R., Carriou, C., & Czischke, D. (2020). Collaborative housing research (1990–2017): A systematic review and thematic analysis of the field. Housing, Theory and Society, 37(1), 10-39.
Nelson, A. (2018). Housing for growth narratives. Housing for degrowth: Principles, models, challenges and opportunities, 2, 3-14.
