Cooperative Housing: The DIY Model of Affordable Housing
As rent skyrockets in growing urban areas, providing affordable housing can seem impossible. There are countless stories of well-planned housing programs gone wrong and the success stories are often on a smaller scale. Increasingly, people are turning to cooperative ownership models to keep rent low, save energy, share resources, and build community.
As a cooperative member, I have experienced first-hand how empowering it is to be your own landlord. Cooperative living brings dignity to low-income housing.
Rent is set by members with the intent of maintaining and improving the standard of living. People’s voices are taken seriously and housemates quickly learn to respect and consolidate many different perspectives.
What does cooperative home ownership look like?
Walk into Ad Astra, a Lawrence, Kansas cooperative that formed in 2001, and you’ll be greeted by brightly colored walls, mishmash of secondhand furniture, and a huge kitchen. The dining room hosts weekly house meals, usually very ambitious ones, and the living room is home to a huge whiteboard full of ideas and duties. Many cooperatives utilize consensus decision-making. Members decide the budget, admit new housemates, and set community standards. Not everyone has to see eye-to-eye, but everyone’s needs and comfort levels are respected.
Rent is cheap, averaging $375 a month for a room, 52% lower than the remainder of the downtown Oread neighborhood. The contrast is even more drastic in cities like Berkeley, California and Austin, Texas. In Austin, a single room in a cooperative runs at around $782 which is about 50% cheaper than the average rent of $1,742. The deal comes with some baseline expectations. Members are expected to spend about five hours a week on maintenance, cooking, and cleaning.
Cooperatives are…
Economically sustainable: Cooperatives are a smart and tested approach to the affordable housing crisis. People below and above the poverty line often live together seamlessly in the same house. The rates offered by cooperatives provide members serious financial relief in a time when according to Enterprise Community Partners, over one-in-four renters in the U.S. need to use at least half their family income to pay for housing and utilities. This relief also carries over to city governments, since people with access to safe housing have a much lower tax burden on cities. Cities that have begun providing housing to the homeless spend much less money on medical and emergency services, saving the city money overall.
Socially sustainable: Sharing common space, making collective decisions, and cooking together creates a sense of family and builds relationships. Cooperatives also empower people to be better community members. Research shows that participating in co-housing decision-making teaches people skills that enable them to be effective political participants and increases their civic engagement.
Environmentally sustainable: Limiting energy-consumption is a win-win for cooperatives. Cost-saving measures like buying ingredients in bulk and using a grey-water system enable them to spend less on food and utilities while also reducing their carbon footprint.
Density is a cooperative’s best asset. Heating and cooling a single-family home for ten people is far more efficient than heating three similar homes that house only eight people total.
Co-ops have a strong do-it-yourself culture, encouraging gardening, composting, and reuse of old items. Very little goes to waste.
Challenges Moving Forward
Despite the benefits, not every community is quick to welcome a cooperative. Cooperatives run into problems with traditional zoning codes, which limit the amount of unrelated people that live together and don’t allow for a secondary living unit alongside single-family homes. These restrictions are meant to address concerns of limited parking and prevent irresponsible tenants from overfilling and neglecting a home, but render these affordable and beneficial housing arrangements illegal.
In Boulder, CO Make Boulder Home is waging a campaign to legalize their cooperatives, which serve as a vibrant cultural hub in the community. Recently, in Scarborough, CT a group of 11 people shared a home together, violating a zoning code that prevents too many unrelated people from sharing a home. The case has gone to federal court. Some cooperatives and advocates are asking for a new zoning code that recognize the needs and variations of cooperatives. Others rely on older codes that allow for boarding houses.
Despite these challenges, cooperatives are catching fire as a solution for low-income housing, allowing neighborhoods to retain income diversity as they develop. Is your community next? If you think you’re in need of sustainable and affordable housing in your area, check out these resources:
North American Students of Cooperation
National Association of Housing Cooperatives
RESUS Design Collective
If you are a local leader (or city expert) and would like to know more about how mySidewalk can help you build a better community, click here for more.
About the Author: Michelle Stockwell is a marketing intern at mySidewalk and rising senior at Hendrix College. Michelle has been involved with Lawrence, Kansas’s cooperative housing community since 2011.
