When I first moved into a housing co-op in 2014, I had no idea what a co-operative was or how they worked. Enticed by the promise of cheap rent, large communal spaces and a beautiful garden, I filled out the forms, went for an interview, got a room, and moved in. Cats wandered around from house to house, people ran bike workshops on weekends, and as a life-long Londoner, I had never had access to so much green space before. For a long time, I couldn’t believe I had been clueless to the co-op model of home ownership. As the housing crisis raged on and my friends moved into progressively smaller houses while paying more rent, it felt like I had cracked some sort of code. Housing crisis or no housing crisis, I had found myself an affordable home.
This election, the nationwide housing crisis has been firmly on the political agenda and everyone is offering a slightly different solution. Theresa May’s Conservatives have promised more council homes that tenants will be allowed to buy after five years (that is if they can afford to), as well as a pledge to halve homelessness (something that has doubled since they came to power in 2010). Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour Party manifesto laid out plans to end the bedroom tax, build a million new council homes, and restore housing benefit to 18-21-year-olds—a benefit that is currently denied to them by Tory policy.
However, as housing charity Shelter says, ‘the housing crisis isn’t about houses—it’s about people’. For young people across the country, the situation is only getting worse. We are earning less, and seeing an ever greater proportion of our earnings going on keeping a roof over our heads. Some of us are moving in with partners prematurely to save money, others can only afford being crammed into small bedrooms with lots of people, some stay in their childhood homes to save money, and there are many of us who don’t even have that option—we have to stay at home and help our parents pay their rent or mortgages instead. So how do we solve the problem?
For some, the answer to the housing crisis lies in housing co-operatives. Similar to a housing association, a housing co-op is a real estate owning legal entity that is managed by its tenants. Tenants have an equal share in the co-op (sometimes as low as £1 each), and by cutting out the middlemen of landlords and even councils, co-ops provide a level of security that private renting can’t compare to. The first examples of housing co-ops were found in parts of England, Germany and Austria throughout the mid-late 19th century, and since then they have flourished in many parts of the world—some more so than others. Co-ops have flourished in places like Canada, where over 250,000 people live in one, and Norway, where co-ops make up a fifth of housing production each year. By taking home ownership into the hands of tenants, co-ops have also traditionally been politicised spaces; German Jews escaping Nazi persecution set up housing co-ops in 1920s New York, and Uganda has a history ofco-operative land and housing projects giving power back to its citizens. In many ways, co-ops sound like a dream scenario. But what is it really like to live in a co-op, especially when you’re a woman living in a big city and, could this eve be a plausible solution to our housing crisis?
26-year-old Maisie and her 25-year-old charity-worker housemate Aziza live in a large Victorian house in Manchester. ‘Before finding this co-op I spent 5 months searching for a place to live’ Aziza says. ‘It was difficult to find a group of people and a space I felt comfortable with. Then this co-op came up—it aimed to be a politicised space and that’s important to me, being a woman, working class, black, and queer. This felt a little more like a refuge.’
Because co-ops often offer single rooms or smaller houses, and might also include rules against living with partners or children, demographics tend to be weighted towards younger people. However, that’s not to say they’re only for the young. Shirley, 54, has lived in housing co-ops since 1981 and says: ‘I was pregnant in a co-op and a squat, then when my daughter was 6 months old we moved here.’ ‘Here’ is a mix of 10 houses and 9 one-bedroom flats around a communal garden in South London, a place that was once teeming with co-ops and has many still going. ‘There used to be about 50 around New Cross and Surrey Quays’ Shirley tells me, ‘because this area had lots of dockers living here. When they closed down all the docks, a lot of them got redundancy pay and moved out to Kent and places like that. Lots of the council houses were empty—the council couldn’t afford to refurbish them—so they all became co-ops in the 80s.’
Co-ops vary in size and location, as well as when it comes to demographics and general rules. While Shirley’s co-op needs to take a certain number of people from the council list, Aziza and Maisie have final say over who comes to live with them. ‘We’ve got a set recruitment process’ Aziza says. ‘We promote the co-op, there’s an application form, and then people come to meet up. We’re trying to find people who wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to live somewhere where you can access good, positive community, or affordable housing that’s also nice. So we prioritise people that are LGBTQ, people of colour, or women. This isn’t a queer co-op officially, but now everyone here is LGBTQ. It’s not the be all and end all, but we’re looking for people who are comfortable living with lots of queer people—and that’s usually people who are queer themselves.’
Community is a common reason why people choose co-op living. While turnover in some co-ops can be high, especially if it’s a co-operative filled with younger people who tend to move home relatively often anyway, the lure of long-term cheap rents and general stability can keep people staying for a long time. Shirley, who has been in different houses within the same co-op for 30 years, says ‘most of the people in the houses have been here since the beginning. It’s a really stable community, and we get on with virtually all our neighbours. That support and care is always a good thing. being in a co-op enables you to pool resources. My neighbour here used to have a child a similar age to my daughter, so we used to share babysitting and things like that. It can be scary at times for various reasons being a woman; there’s a fear of violence, or people breaking in. If you live in a community where you know your neighbours you know you can holler out, and that’s perfect to me.’
For Maisie, the community aspect of co-op living has been a fundamental part of her wellbeing after she became ill last year: ‘I originally just wanted somewhere more communal to live in, because it felt like such a waste of time and energy that I was living in a house where people would individually cook just one pot of pasta. I guess I’ve stayed here because I want to be in a politicised space, but also when I got ill, everything in my life changed. I couldn’t work anymore, and I was incredibly unable to do anything for myself. But being here was so amazing because there was already a communal structure. It didn’t feel like I was becoming this burden on my housemates; people make dinner every day, so it’s not like cooking for me meant people were forced to take care of me. It has prevented me having to move back in with my parents. But also when I had problems with money at the beginning of being ill before my benefits got sorted out, I just didn’t pay rent for 3 months. And that was fine, because we live in a co-op and we can do that. Obviously, that’s dependent on what your co-op’s finances are like, but it was life-saving for me.’
‘The positives are the people, mainly,’ Zara, also in her mid-20s, tells me. ‘Being able to interact with a lot of different people from different backgrounds, on a family level, is nice. In the beginning, I felt it was ok to be myself here, and relax. Obviously there’s the cheap rent, but to be honest I’ve been moving around London for about 6 years. I’d prefer peace of mind and a calm, easy environment, to cheap rent. It’s the only thing I want.’
Co-ops can come across as a sort of utopia, but ‘peace of mind and a calm, easy environment’ aren’t always given. Housing co-ops are full of people of who don’t know each other well—or at all—before living together, and the application process can be long and very competitive. After decades of co-op life, Shirley was direct about the negatives involved: ‘it’s a business. You’ve got to follow rules and regulations, and you’ve got to work. You might feel like something’s happened and you want to take time off, but if everybody feels that, then your business goes down the pan and you can lose your home. I’ve got a 3-bedroom house that costs £112 a week, but that’s what you get for doing the work and not having to pay people to do it for you. But it is a commitment. I’ve seen lots of co-ops in my time go under because people haven’t kept their eye on the ball.’
Maisie and Aziza both pointed out that while the political edge co-ops have is what enticed them to their home in the first place, co-op politics can be problematic. Maisie said ‘I think there are huge problems in all co-ops with politics. A lot of people think their home is radical when it’s not; a lot of co-ops now can come out of university or activism style politics, which are quite exclusive.’ Aziza added ‘I think some of the reason why co-ops are exclusive spaces that claim to be more radical than they actually are is that to start a co-op, you need a lot of money. White middle-class men tend to have the capital that’s required to set up these spaces, so you get a lot of co-ops that have been set up by (and are predominantly from) that demographic. I don’t think white middle-class men can create a space that is intentionally inclusive of women or black people without those groups actually being in the space to start.’
Co-ops are spaces where people live together, and like all spaces in which human beings coexist, race, gender and class politics pervade everything within them. But some people argue that co-ops are places where dynamics are actually exaggerated, that their business-like structure enables people to further enact their prejudices. As recently as a few decades ago, some co-ops were known for explicitly racist application policies. Even today, co-ops in heavily black and brown areas in North and South London can be filled with white middle-class people, and it’s been argued these co-ops add to the gentrification of certain areas. Zara is black and working class and open about her negative experiences in her co-op. ‘There’s so much male white privilege. A lot of sexism here too, even though there are fewer men in the house than women. But they’ve given themselves all the important jobs like sorting out rent, accounts, money and food, and so the women are left to do things like cook and clean. There have also been a lot of racist, classist microaggressions, too. So many people here come from middle-class backgrounds, it’s ridiculous—they do the house shop in Waitrose. I know if I say something or complain I’ll be labelled as aggressive, so I keep my mouth shut. But they don’t have a housing need, and I don’t think they should really be here. They’re not disadvantaged. One of the girls in my house got £5,000 from her parents as a 25th birthday present, but she still feels entitled to pay £300 a month in rent. There are only two people in the house who are from London and everyone else is from the countryside; they have families with money and big houses. But they come here and live in co-ops, and have more disposable income—a lot of the time for drugs and booze and partying. It doesn’t feel fair.’
As the housing crisis rages on there’s a lot of support for the co-op model from all sides of the political sphere, as well as discussion around whether they are truly a solution. Despite co-ops often being viewed through a left-wing or radical lens, Margaret Thatcher was a supporter of the co-op model. City Hall and the Greater London Authority began to invest into looking at policy around community-led housing back in 2004, something that has continued under both Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan’s time in office. Asking Shirley her thoughts about co-ops as a housing crisis solution, she responded with ‘I think it’s one of many options for social housing, but you need to have many different types. It’s interesting there’s been a number of Tories have an interest in housing co-ops; Tories like to privatise everything, you either own something or rent something from a private landlord that’s making the profit. But there needs to be a transition for that idea, they’d need to have some sort of social housing. Co-ops can fit in quite nicely in that because we are owner-occupiers, so that fits in with those views. But if co-ops mean that more people have the opportunity to have a home, then so be it.’
When I posed concerns about co-ops not actually solving the housing crisis problem to a senior civil servant who specialises in housing and asked not to be named, I was told: ‘I think you’re conflating the state's responsibility to provide homes for the homeless (it should), with investment in social housing (the state does this, but whether you accept their definition of affordable is another question), and finally with housing being expensive and needing capital. That’s why it's so difficult to build homes in general, why companies will only do it if there's a reward/profit, and one of the reasons community-led housing projects struggle due to their lack of a track record which means that they have a higher risk profile which makes loans even more expensive. The state does not provide financing or mortgages to co-ops at present, nor would I imagine a commercial lender doing so without a strong business case. The main thing here is whether the state should be providing affordable rented housing for people, and of course, it should. Government legislation and policy means that the housing it invests in is not necessarily actually affordable. Community-led housing has an important role to play, complementary to 'normal' affordable housing. In a way you could say that community-led housing now could be kind of a new wave of social housing, that is striving to do what housing associations and almshouses before them did. Some housing authorities have lost their way a bit, and community-led housing is growing from that grassroots space, and ramping up efforts to connect and deliver with a much stronger sense of community built in.’
Aziza, however, remains sceptical: ‘it does feel like co-ops are a sort of big society solution to quite a huge crisis. I really do feel that the state should be taking responsibility for homelessness and investing in social housing. Which is completely what they’re not doing—it’s not on their agenda. It does make me feel queasy thinking about how co-ops that are financed by the community are basically solving that problem. But putting that aside, the biggest problem about co-ops being the solution is that you need to have a lot of capital, and only certain people do.’ The problem of money isn’t limited to getting a mortgage in the first place; Maisie pointed out ‘this house is falling down in lots of ways but because we’re not rich people, we can’t really afford to do the repairs. It costs money to keep a house running, but our mortgage is so big that we can’t actually afford to do that. So there’s tension there—is this actually a perfect solution?’
The answer, it seems, is no. Despite promotion from both the left and right, it’s still a lot of work to run a co-op, and according to Shirley things aren’t getting easier. ‘The bureaucracy is making it really unnecessarily hard for people that are running co-ops. To keep them going, over time people need to do less work rather than more. And the work has definitely got harder, now you need people to be more highly trained. Back in the day, we’d learn while we were doing it and teach other people, now it’s much more complex. You need courses to work out formulas and stuff like that when we used to just calculate rent on the back of fag packets.’
If you’re interested in co-op living, however, don’t despair. Groups like Radical Routes, CDS and Catalyst Collective offer advice and a network for people interested in living in or setting up their own co-ops, and I’ve found from experience most people are willing to take the time to explain application processes or co-op rules. It’s obvious that for countless numbers of people, the cooperative model of housing can be a godsend—especially in today’s world, where millennials find themselves working multiple jobs that are often badly paid. For all their faults, co-ops can still be wonderful places. However, perhaps the question we should be asking ourselves isn’t if co-ops can solve the housing crisis, but instead, why successive governments have allowed this country’s housing crisis to occur in the first place.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.