Prefigurative Community Building (Part 12)
Shelter in Solidarity: Starting a Housing Cooperative as a Power With Coordination Pattern
The global housing crisis reveals a deep failure of current systems to treat shelter as a human right. Across the world, people are being priced out of cities, evicted without recourse, pushed into exploitative rental arrangements, or left to live unhoused and unsafe. Housing has become a commodity, hoarded, speculated upon, and leveraged for profit, rather than a fundamental need and shared good.
Housing cooperatives offer a different possibility. They are more than an alternative ownership model, they are a profound reconfiguration of power around the question of home. Built on the principles of democratic participation, shared stewardship, and mutual care, housing co-ops allow residents to control their own shelter in ways that resist exploitation and build Power With rather than Power Over.
This essay provides a step-by-step guide to starting a housing cooperative, rooted in relational power and equity. It also links to resources and provides real-world examples of projects doing this critical work.
Why a Power With Housing Cooperative?
Housing cooperatives are organizations where the people who live in the housing collectively own or manage it. But unlike homeowner associations or property management companies, co-ops are not top-down. The goal isn’t to enforce compliance or extract value, it’s to meet the shared need for stable, dignified shelter together.
A Power With housing project:
Shares decision-making horizontally
Includes residents of all backgrounds and circumstances
Aims to de-commodify housing
Respects the agency of those often excluded: low-income renters, unhoused neighbors, undocumented individuals, and people with disabilities
Fosters relationships of accountability, care, and autonomy
Step-by-Step Guide: Starting a Housing Cooperative as a Power With System
Step 1: Form a Founding Circle Grounded in Shared Need and Trust
Start by gathering a small group of people who are experiencing housing insecurity or precarity, or who want to build housing justice together. Prioritize diversity in experience: renters, unhoused folks, youth, elders, single parents, disabled residents.
Hold listening circles to name collective needs, hopes, and fears. This first step is crucial: trust must come before structure.
Power With principle: Everyone’s voice matters. No experts, no leaders, just shared story, solidarity, and vision.
Step 2: Decide What Kind of Housing Project You’re Creating
Options include:
Limited-equity cooperative: Members purchase shares below market value and agree to limited resale profits
Rental cooperative: Members pay rent, but decisions are made democratically and collectively
Community land trust (CLT) partnership: The land is owned collectively and leased affordably to residents
Tiny home village or mutual aid shelter: Temporary or mobile structures collectively built and stewarded
Make this decision together based on your group’s capacity, values, and the needs of those most vulnerable.
Step 3: Identify and Secure Land or Property
This is the most difficult and politicized step. Consider:
Partnering with an existing land trust or nonprofit
Pooling small amounts of funding through mutual aid or fundraising
Working with faith groups or disused public buildings
Exploring land back campaigns with Indigenous partners
Advocating for municipal transfer of vacant or foreclosed properties to co-ops or land trusts
If full property ownership isn’t possible, consider leaseholds, building takeovers, or modular housing collectives on borrowed land.
Resource:
Grounded Solutions Network – Community Land Trust Directory
Step 4: Create a Governance Structure Based on Power With
Avoid defaulting to parliamentary models that replicate Power Over. Instead:
Use consensus or sociocracy for group decisions
Distribute roles based on availability, not hierarchy
Rotate facilitators and stewards
Design transparent feedback loops and accountability practices
Use shared agreements or “living documents” instead of rigid rules
Resource:
Sociocracy for All – Practical guides to horizontal governance structures
Step 5: Ensure Housing is Accessible to Unhoused and At-Risk People
Power With means no gatekeeping. Make sure your housing cooperative:
Reserves space for those transitioning out of homelessness
Partners with mutual aid groups to identify people in urgent need
Avoids background checks, income requirements, or credit histories that exclude the most marginalized
Integrates trauma-informed care and harm reduction in daily life
Housing justice cannot exist if it replicates the exclusions of the market.
Resource:
Homes for All – Right to the City Alliance – A national housing justice network supporting anti-displacement and housing organizing
Step 6: Secure Funding Without Surrendering Autonomy
Options include:
Grassroots fundraising and community bonds
Cooperative banks and credit unions
Grants from aligned foundations
Municipal support (without bureaucratic capture)
Public pressure to divert city funds from policing to housing cooperatives
Ensure that funding does not shift decision-making power to outside investors or institutions.
Resource:
Seed Commons – A cooperative network of non-extractive lenders supporting community-owned initiatives
Step 7: Document, Share, and Celebrate
Build documentation into your process—photos, stories, financial models, lessons learned—so others can replicate what you build.
Hold communal events. Share meals. Host art nights. Make your housing co-op not just a place to live, but a site of joy, resistance, and belonging.
Examples of Power With Housing Projects
1. East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (California, USA)
This Black-led cooperative permanently removes land from the speculative market and transfers decision-making to working-class residents of color. It uses collective governance, land trusts, and equity structures designed to redistribute wealth and power.
Website: https://ebprec.org/
2. Sun Housing Co-op (London, UK)
Sun Housing Co-op is a member-led initiative in London aiming to develop purpose-built communal housing and workspace. Operating under sociocratic principles, it functions as a Mutual Home Ownership Society, allowing members to pay a flat rate of 35% of their monthly income as rent, reassessed annually. The co-op emphasizes equality and diversity, ensuring long-term, affordable housing solutions that are democratically controlled by its members.
Website: https://sun-coop.github.io/
Repairing Home, Together
Housing is not just about shelter, it is about belonging. It is the material and emotional foundation for our sense of safety, rest, and community. When people are unhoused, overburdened, or forced into extraction-based arrangements, it fractures the social and relational fabric that holds communities together.
By organizing housing cooperatives as Power With systems, we begin to reweave that fabric. We shift the question from “Who owns this?” to “How do we care for this together?” And in doing so, we plant the seeds of a housing future not built on fear and competition, but on interdependence and dignity.