Co-operation Housing, Western Australia

03/05/2026

What can Australia's past teach us about its housing future?

ABC Radio National has a new podcast series worth your time — Lessons in Living, hosted by Professor of Architecture Anthony Burke. It looks at how Australians have lived together throughout history, and what those lessons might offer us today — from the tightly packed worker's cottages of the early 1900s, where strong community bonds helped people get by, to the bold experiments in communal and co-operative living during the 1970s.

The series asks a quietly radical question: are Australians ready to embrace the idea of home not as a private fortress, but as a place where shared space and personal privacy coexist?

That question sits at the heart of what co-operative housing has always been about — and it's one Australia needs to reckon with more seriously as the housing crisis deepens.

The episode features voices from Moora Moora Co-operative in the Dandenong Ranges, one of Australia's long-running co-operative communities, alongside historians and housing researchers reflecting on what we have tried before, and why it matters now.

The final episode of the series goes further still — asking what it would mean to design homes that prioritise community, care, and belonging, and whether we could trade fences for friendships and privacy for participation.

It's a thoughtful, Australian conversation about a very Australian problem — and a reminder that the ideas we need aren't entirely new. We've lived this way before. We can again. 🎧

🔗 Link to listen in the comments.

We look at how Australians have lived together in the past — and what those lessons might offer us today. From the tightly packed worker’s cottages of the early 1900s, where strong community bonds helped people get by, to the bold experiments in communal and cooperative living during the 1970s, ...

01/05/2026

A rich study worth sharing. Here's a post with a design focus:

What does it look like when one of the world's leading architecture firms takes co-living seriously as a design problem?
Dutch architects MVRDV have released a co-living design study called Social Spaciousness — and it's a genuinely exciting piece of thinking about how the built environment can foster community rather than just accommodate it.

At the heart of the study is the concept of "social spaciousness" — designing buildings so that residents encounter each other naturally, through the everyday movement of living, rather than through organised events or forced interaction. It's a deceptively simple idea with significant design implications.

The study presents fifteen typologies — diverse arrangements of homes and shared spaces built on repetitive volumes for ease and affordability of construction. Among them: a "Stacked Village" where each floor has its own distinct character, collectively forming a vertical neighbourhood; and "Vibrant Heart", where shared spaces are arranged so that every residential level has direct access to communal areas.

One of the most compelling ideas in the study is what MVRDV does with corridors. Rather than treating them as empty transitional spaces, the typologies reimagine corridors as the "streets" of the building — activated with libraries, sports areas, and shop windows, turning previously dark and purposeless spaces into genuinely social ones.

The study also grapples seriously with the climate challenge. Rather than defaulting to demolition and rebuild, it explores how vacant office buildings and other stranded assets can be transformed into co-living housing — an approach that releases significantly less carbon while addressing the housing shortage and preserving the character of existing structures.

For those of us working in community and co-operative housing, there is a lot here worth sitting with. Design is not decoration — it shapes whether people connect or stay strangers. The question of how a building can make sharing feel natural, and community feel effortless, is one of the most important design questions of our time.

🔗Link to learn more in the comments.

29/04/2026

One of the biggest barriers to co-operative housing isn't vision — it's financing.

This Co-operative Housing International member forum brings together practitioners from England, Canada, and Catalonia to share the creative financing mechanisms they are using to get cooperative housing built when conventional finance alone won't get the job done.

The conversation is a timely one. As housing markets have become more expensive and government support for co-operative housing more patchy, the gap between what financing can deliver and what members can actually afford to pay has widened. These speakers are working at that gap and finding real solutions.

Well worth a watch for anyone working in community housing, housing policy, or cooperative development — and a useful reminder that financing innovation is happening, even if it is not always visible from here in Australia.

🎬 Link to watch the video in the comments.

27/04/2026

What does "community" actually look like when you move the key in the door?

Research from Anglia Ruskin University followed residents of two London Community Land Trust developments — St Clements in Tower Hamlets and Citizens House in Lewisham — to find out.

The findings are honest and human. Residents overwhelmingly valued their homes, the security, and the friendly neighbourliness that developed. But the grander vision — active residents transforming their neighbourhoods through community governance — was slower to take root than hoped. Life got in the way. Work, family, exhaustion from years of housing stress. As one resident put it: "I've got it now, thank you."

The researchers use the concept of "conviviality" to describe what they found — not utopian community, but the everyday "rubbing along" that is, in its own way, meaningful and real.

This resonates deeply with what we see in co-operative housing every day. Building genuine community takes time, trust, and often a bit of productive friction. The important thing is creating the conditions for it to grow.

🔗 Link to read the full paper in the comments.

26/04/2026

Co-operative housing is sometimes talked about as if it's a new idea. It isn't.

The Amalgamated Housing Co-operative in the Bronx, New York, has been providing affordable homes to moderate-income families since 1927 — nearly a century ago. amalgamated-bronx It is the oldest limited equity housing co-operative in the United States, and is still home to almost 1,500 families today.

Founded by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union under the leadership of Abraham E. Kazan — later known as "the father of co-operative housing in the United States" — it was built on a simple principle: co-operation for service, not profit. Rents stayed affordable because the co-operative model removed speculative gain from the equation. Residents governed themselves democratically. Community life was built in from the start, with education programs, activities for all ages, and a community newsletter that has been published continuously since 1929.

Amalgamated went on to inspire the United Housing Foundation, which built tens of thousands of homes for moderate-income families across New York.

Nearly 100 years later, the model still works. The buildings are still standing, the community is still active, and the families who live there still have genuinely affordable homes in one of the most expensive cities on earth.

We often talk about the housing crisis as if it arrived without warning. But the solutions — co-operative ownership, limited equity, democratic governance, housing as a right rather than an investment — have been proven for generations. The question has never really been whether co-operative housing works. It's whether we have the will to build more of it.

🔗 Link to learn more in the comments.

24/04/2026

What if the design of a neighbourhood could make sharing feel natural?

That's the central idea behind Sege Park in Malmö, Sweden — a prize-winning urban development by architects Kjellander Sjöberg that takes a genuinely different approach to how housing is designed and lived in.

Their proposal, called "It Takes a Block", won the Nordic Built Cities Challenge innovation competition and is now shaping Malmö's new showcase for sustainable urban development, with 800 homes planned over ten years.

The design logic is elegant: by deliberately increasing the amount of shared space throughout the neighbourhood, private dwellings can be kept compact — creating additional value for residents while reducing the footprint of each home. Sharing isn't an afterthought or a policy requirement. It's baked into the architecture itself.

The block structure brings together a mix of residential typologies and tenure types, with sharing of resources, time, and knowledge woven as a red thread throughout. The built environment is designed to actively prompt interaction — to make the sustainable, community-minded choice the easy one.

The site itself has a beautiful park landscape and buildings from the 1930s, and the proposal works with those existing qualities rather than against them — allowing the new built environment to densify organically over time, creating space for a rich socioeconomic mix.

It's a powerful reminder that co-operative living isn't only a governance model or a financial structure — it's also a design challenge. The best community housing asks: what does the building itself do to bring people together? Sege Park is a beautiful answer to that question.

🔗 Link to learn more in the comments.

22/04/2026

When a group of Amsterdam university students couldn't find affordable housing, they asked a simple question: "What if we built our own?"

That question became De Torteltuin — a resident-led housing cooperative now under development on Amsterdam's IJburg island. The group collectively designed the building, secured land from the city council, and are financing it through a community bond campaign. Rents will be fixed and low, the building energy-neutral, and decisions made democratically by the people who live there.

The city of Amsterdam is taking notice. The municipality has set out to realise 40,000 cooperative homes by 2040 — around 10% of all new construction in that period.

This is not a radical experiment. In Germany and Switzerland, co-operative housing has long been a mainstream part of the housing system. The question is why it has taken so long everywhere else.

Here in Western Australia, Co-operation Housing is asking the same questions and building the same kinds of answers. The model works. What it needs is the political will to back it.

🔗 Link to read the Guardian article in the comments.

20/04/2026

Australia once declared that decent housing was "not only the need but the right of every citizen." That was 1944. What happened next is a sobering story.

An ANU paper, The Rise and Fall of Public Housing in Australia, traces how that bold post-war ambition — to provide affordable, quality rental housing as a matter of choice — was gradually eroded through successive Commonwealth State Housing Agreements from 1945 to 2000.

The shift from housing as a social right to housing as a residual safety net didn't happen overnight. It happened incrementally, agreement by agreement.

For those of us working in the community housing sector, this history matters. Understanding how we got here is essential to making the case for where we need to go.

🔗 Link to read the paper in the comments.

15/04/2026

📚 New research: housing co-operatives show us how to rethink “value” in housing

A new Housing Studies paper argues that housing research and policy focus too heavily on financial value, when housing also creates important social and environmental value. Using a scoping review of 68 peer-reviewed articles, the authors examine housing co-operatives as a model that helps make those broader forms of value visible.

The review finds that housing co-operatives are underpinned by values like democratic decision-making, collective action and sustainability, and that these principles are linked to outcomes such as social solidarity and environmental stewardship. The authors argue this offers important lessons for mainstream housing systems and policy.

💡 In other words: if we only measure housing by price, yield or asset growth, we miss a huge part of what makes housing actually valuable.

🔗 Link to read the article in the comments.