Why should you own the place you live in? Something like a housing cooperative is great. Also having single family housing in villages is fine. They are somewhat needed to run agricultural businesses and the like. Cities are great as a concentration of resources and talent lowers transport costs a lot and that makes everything more efficent. However they are mostly good at producing fresh produce and they can produce all they need realisticly. However we still need rural areas to produce other agricultural products.
It sometimes feel like some people would rather force others to become homeowners than accept the fact that landlords (in any shape or form) might be necessary…
I’m not going to purchase a house if I know I don’t have the means to maintain it or if I know I’m moving temporarily.
Housing cooperatives quickly turn into unmaintained garbage. When everyone owns something, nobody cares for it.
Own your own living space.
Research in Canada found that housing cooperatives had residents rate themselves as having the highest quality of life and housing satisfaction of any housing organization in the city.[8] Other research among older residents from the rural United States found that those living in housing cooperatives felt much safer, independent, satisfied with life, had more friends, had more privacy, were healthier and had things repaired faster.[9] Australian researchers found that cooperative housing built stronger social networks and support, as well as better relationships with neighbours compared to other forms of housing.[10] They cost 14% less for residents and had lower rates of debt and vacancy. Other US research has found that housing cooperatives tended to have higher rates of building quality, building safety, feelings of security among residents, lower crime rates, stable access to housing and significantly lower costs compared to conventional housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Research_on_housing_cooperatives
The residents own the building indirectly. That means all of them look out for it. Unlike a commercial rent, the people who own it also live in it, which means they actually care about the quality. The cooperative has an actual structure to organize repairs, upkeep of shared spaces like floors and a way to collect money to pay for those. A private residence especially the later part can be a problem. Not having the money to pay for repairs or upgrades is rather common, especially for the retired.
Social studies are worth fuck all. This kind of research is pointless and has barely if any basis in reality.
Not all decommodified / cooperatively owned housing needs to be the sort of social housing that tend to come to mind when thinking of a “housing co-op.”
Check out the work that the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust is doing in Los Angeles: https://laecovillage.org/community-land-trust/. The “eco village” operates in this more crunchy, housing co-op sort of way, but then there are also lots of tenants and home-owners alike who live on the land owned by the land trust, without owning their homes in the standard sense.
That’s just not true. As long as you have a defined structure and responsibilities
Why should you own the place you live in? Something like a housing cooperative is great.
In housing cooperatives, don’t the residents own the building jointly?
I think the original source specifies owning, not renting, because in American capitalism, if you don’t own the place you live, the owner has a lot of power over you and a lot of ways to abuse that power. Renting sucks.
It depends on the cooperative, but the most common one, is that the cooperative owns the building and only residents can own shares. Those shares are only for sale to future residents and can only be bought and sold from and to the cooperative. Hence no free trading. Generally for older ones they tend to be rather cheap.
So yes the building is somewhat owned by the residents, but in many cases it is deliberatly turned into an awfull asset, which is unprofitable for the owners.
