Housing Cooperatives

This workshop provides an introduction to the structure, principles, and development of Limited-Equity Housing Cooperatives and offers valuable information for community members, organizers, housing advocates, and others interested in cooperative housing and community wealth building. 

De Nieuwe Meent is a seven-story apartment building in Amsterdam built around commoning and cooperative practices.

CHF Canada profiles three New Brunswick Housing Cooperatives. 

In this webinar, Lindsay Harris, Executive Director of Propolis Housing Cooperative, talks about how her Kamloops-based co-op raised $1.1 million using community bonds. She shares key learnings from years of hard work, including navigating the technical aspects of issuing community bonds and building community support.

I spoke with two notable architects – Neeraj Bhatia and Antje Steinmüller – who have intensively studied the social and economic dynamics of co-living. This is a relatively neglected field of inquiry in architecture, housing development, and urban policy. But as my two interviewees explained, commoning can play a powerful role in expanding this overlooked sector of housing. 

On March 2^nd, 2026, cooperative educator and “recovering farmer” Emi Do and I visited Heather Pritchard at her home on Fraser Common Cooperative Farm, near Aldergrove, British Columbia. After a brief tour of the farm, twenty acres on the foothills above the Fraser River Valley, and a conversation with fellow farm co-op member David Catzell, we sat down for lunch at Heather’s kitchen table and spoke for over an hour. The following is a lightly edited version of her reflections.

Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM), founded in May 1970, embodies the spirit of community and support. Serving 35,000 families through 760 cooperatives in a nation of approximately 3.5 million inhabitants, they are a beacon of collaboration. With a cooperative school for children and numerous consumer, distribution, and worker cooperatives linked to their vision, they are shaping a brighter future.

Housing advocates in Eugene, Oregon, are seeking to create a legislative framework that would allow tenants to collectively acquire multifamily buildings when a building comes up for sale.

Ebony Gustave writes about touring several cooperatives in the Hudson Valley as part of the Cooperative Leaders & Scholars Fellowship.

Unfortunately not everybody's experience of cooperatives is positive. For Elle, their time in co-operatives was both transformative, but also painful, marred by classism that often goes unnamed.