Housing Cooperatives

Bayard Rustin, who was one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s key advisors, as well as a planner of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a leader in social movements for peace, civil rights, non-violence, and LGBTQ+ rights, is famous today for organizing the 1963 March on Washington. In those days, owing to him being gay, Rustin’s name and accomplishments were hidden from public view. It led him to be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2013.

Deploying the principles and strategies of cooperation, Linda Leaks fought for housing justice in Washington, DC for 35 years.

This country needs more affordable homeownership options. And more communities are looking to the long-established Limited Equity Cooperative (LEC) and Community Land Trust (CLT) models to provide a permanently affordable way to provide homes for low and moderate-income individuals and families. But how do these models work to provide housing ownership and stability? Who controls the decision-making, and how do you get them financed and developed?

As World War II ended and Americans turned their attention to problems at home, union leaders and other prominent New Yorkers came to believe that cooperative housing would solve the city’s century-old problem of providing decent housing at a reasonable cost for working-class families. In Working-Class Utopias: A History of Cooperative Housing in New York City, Robert Fogelson, one of the nation’s foremost urban historians, tells the story of this ambitious movement from the construction of the Amalgamated Houses after World War I to the building of Co-op City, the world’s largest housing cooperative, four decades later.

Cooperative ownership offers a way for residents to not only have a say in their community’s decision-making, but also to prevent rent hikes and keep their housing costs affordable.

Co-op City is the largest housing cooperative in the country.

To make housing truly affordable, governments need to support non-profit housing cooperatives.

Michael Lebowitz shares his perspective on the social economic models in Venezuela and Yugoslavia. Lebowitz highlights the importance of self-actualization through protagonism and how the most successful of these models focused on solidarity over self-interest.

Kim Capen, the ROC Association Director for the New England Region, talks about his work on the ROC Association, including specific initiatives regarding stigma and branding.

How to start a housing co-op.