Cooperative housing

I like the idea of the shared ownership of the building. When every inhabitant feels responsible for the property – be it hackerspace or the apartment building. This idea can expand even further to owning the land around, then to your district, your city, and your country. But it all starts with expanding your comfort zone outside your apartment.

When you share the ownership with the inhabitants of someplace, you have to have some sort of management body where you elect people from your community. These people are responsible for solving problems. You can rotate this position so everyone has a chance to experience what it’s like. It’s going to be problem-solving and features implementation. And I think it’s nice.
I would love to know my neighbors and have a sense of community rather than living in an individual corner and never caring about who and what is outside it. But the latter is how I live right now.

The downside of sharing anything with other people is that everyone has different living standards. Something that must be fixed for one, can be completely fine for the other. And when it takes money to get to the resolution, not everyone will be happy to participate. I’m willing to accept this challenge and figure out the ways how the community can deal with it rather than have no influence on the situation and just wait until someone else like the house administration will solve it.

This idea I’m talking about is known as cooperative house owning. And there have been the times when Soviet government sponsored the building of such cooperatively owned apartments. But as soon as this sponsorship disappeared the commercial developers won the market.

When you buy an apartment from a commercial developer you don’t have to know your neighbors. You don’t have to worry about anything outside of “your property”. And this destroys any incentive for inhabitants to collaborate.

I had some experience of “collective ownership” in the student dormitory, and have it now with the hackerspace. But both of these examples are actually collective renting with shared responsibility. Which is not bad too. And I enjoy it. I will let you know after several years how is it going with my attempt to have a community in the place I live and hopefully own.

What do you think about this idea? Please, share your comments.