This blog opens a series of articles on the topic of Postgrowth and Housing. We begin with a focus on housing commodification and the possible pathways towards housing commons, through discussing collaborative alternatives and their potential.
Author: Agata Guńková
Housing is an inseparable part of everyone’s life. It is impossible to imagine the course of our lives without a place to live. A house provides material security and a shelter, but also a sense of belonging and stability. It serves the role of a home, which carries many personal psychological, emotional and social meanings. Access to housing then lets us create a stable home. Without it, it is difficult to build resilient infrastructures of care, which are essential to human wellbeing and prosperity.
In today’s world threatened by multiple crises, an increasing number of people are experiencing a range of housing related struggles, from severe housing precarity to evictions and homelessness. Within the Netherlands, there has been an estimated 24% increase in the number of homeless persons since 2022, while rents have increased 18.5 % in the last decade.
Yet, what has been framed as a housing “crisis” might be slightly misleading, as it suggests the current state of things is merely a hiccup in an otherwise well-functioning system. What geographer David Harvey argues however, is that the current state is an inherent trait of the current phase of neoliberal capitalism. The perception of a “crisis” rose to mainstream attention only since unaffordability, instability and evictions have reached the middle class. However, for the vulnerable populations, housing under capitalism has always been in a crisis, and continues to be so.
Not everyone experiences the housing “crisis” in the same way, with not only class, but also race or migration background playing a role. In the Netherlands, residents spent an average of 22.6% of their disposable income on housing 2022. But for people with the lowest incomes that number is much higher, as they pay almost half of their earnings to secure a home. Evictions and gentrification disproportionately affect communities of colour and migrants. This disparity is clear as nearly half of the homeless population in the Netherlands was born outside the country, as well as since the burden of housing costs falls most heavily on people born outside Europe and those with parents from non-European backgrounds.
While housing unaffordability certainly has local variations, there are global processes that make it harder for everyday people around the world to find a home. At the core are the commodification and financialisation of housing.
Commodification generally refers to the domination of the economic value of housing over its use as a home. When housing is talked about as an investment opportunity, rather than a place for people to live in, it reinforces the idea that homes are commodities. This perspective, nowadays widely accepted in mainstream debates, then determines what housing is built, what laws are passed to protect tenants, who buys investment property and who is able to secure a home.
This process is then intensified through financialisation of housing, which is the increasing importance of property as an investment asset. The growth of the global economy has become dependent on the expansion of the financial sector, as opposed to service and industry. This shift came with the growing promotion of market-based financing of homes, but also mass accumulation of property by global financial actors. Through transnational private equity, pension funds and hedge funds, entire cities’ neighbourhoods are being purchased and sold on financial markets. This leads to wealth accumulation through speculation and foreign rent extraction.
One example is Blackstone, an infamous alternative investment firm based in Manhattan, whose business practices were criticized by UN experts in 2019 for their devastating impact on local communities. Under Blackstone’s management, tenants worldwide have experienced substantial rent inflations, heavy fees for basic repairs and mass evictions. Nearly six years later, Blackstone has hit a new milestone, now managing over US$1.1 trillion in assets — a sum roughly equal to the GDP of the Netherlands. This situation is far from exceptional, as similar stories are common among global corporate landlords globally.
In our cities, housing is treated as a financial asset rather than as a basic human right. This leads to depoliticisation of housing as a technical rather than political issue, whose growing unaffordability can be solved through increased building. However, it is not a simple issue of mismatch between supply and demand. While building more homes might seem like a straightforward solution, the deeper issue in many cities isn’t just a lack of housing. It’s the way housing has been turned into a financial asset, driving speculation and unequal access, and unaffordability.
A turn to postgrowth, which promotes an economy organised around wellbeing and planetary boundaries rather than accumulation, could therefore represent the needed change. A postgrowth transition can challenge accumulation through property and pursue alternatives which instead aim for social and ecological wellbeing. Potential solutions must highlight the need for public affordable housing, new forms of collective ownership, strong tenant rights and organising, as well as decommodification. The housing crisis can only be addressed when acknowledging capitalist accumulation as a root cause and rejecting free-market solutions to achieve its goals.
Towards commoning of housing
Pursuing post-growth policies in housing must thus focus on provisioning affordable public housing, but also the support for alternative housing structures, which allow for bottom-up housing organising, autonomy and practices of housing commons.
There has been a rise in popularity of various collaborative housing projects. While not always using the same terminology, such projects pursue democratic decision-making, mutual aid, collective participation in self-management and non-speculative forms of ownership. Collaborative housing is often seen as an example of urban commons. It is because of common-pooling of material resources, but also commoning practices in social relationships. These refer to experimentation with new forms of horizontal organising and decision-making that strive for post-capitalist transformations. The practice of creating commons is then referred to as housing commoning.
Commoning of housing can be divided into three dimensions where the practice takes place: firstly the social relations and self-organisation, secondly the ownership structures and relation to the housing market, and finally the use and access to resources and the environment. These are outlined in the diagram below:
Projects such as housing cooperatives, community land trusts, co-housing, squats or eco-villages can all fall under the umbrella of collaborative housing. Some of these forms are not new but rather see a resurgence in the last decades. In the Netherlands, the term collaborative housing mainly refers to houses self-identifying as wooncoöperatie, centraal wonen, woongemeenschap, ecodorp or woongroep.
Collaborative housing initiatives pursue commoning and postgrowth in different ways, so it is important to look at each of them individually. Some are committed to grassroot housing activism and new visions of ownership, others lean more towards sharing of amenities or ecological building. Not every project fits neatly into the centre of the “commoning” diagram shown above.
In this way, hardly any initiative could fulfill the ideal of a radical and emancipatory living, that embraces all aspects of commoning. However, all projects engage in some forms of alternative housing community co-creation through everyday practices of sharing and cooperation. They then take part in processes of commoning not just within shared spaces and resources, but also relationships, values, and conversations of possible futures of cities and collective living. It’s a messy and imperfect process, but a vital one — weaving together both the material and the imaginative work of building more communal ways of living.
Limits of collaborative housing
Collaborative housing models are also facing many challenges: from legal struggles related to complicated forms of ownership, through lengthy building or acquisition processes to lack of funding. They are in constant negotiation with the surrounding state hierarchies, bureaucracy and market competition, as they are trying to resist co-optation and maintain autonomy. Fundraising through direct loans from local communities, anti-speculation ownership structures or engagement in political housing struggles can all serve as resistance to these threats. Solidarity networks, which work to share knowledge and finances are crucial in helping alternative housing projects navigate these tensions.
An example is Mietshäuser Syndikat, which operates as a decentralised network, solidarity fund and co-owner of collaborative housing projects in Germany. Mietshäuser Syndikat provides a loan to groups interested in buying a home together. This then partially finances the purchase of their house, together with direct loans, bank mortgages and other external funds. Tenants of the new house then pay solidarity contributions in place of rent, which are kept at an affordable rate. After the loan has been fully repaid, contributions remain to be transferred to the syndicate and are used for funding of new projects. Even in the case of unilateral agreement of its tenants, the house cannot be sold, as Mietshäuser Syndikat is given the right to veto, which functions as a decommodification mechanism.
Apart from funding, the organisation also serves as a network for knowledge and expertise sharing, which can be invaluable to new projects. Similar projects can be found in other countries, such as VrijCoop in the Netherlands, Sdílené Domy in the Czech Republic, habiTAT in Austria, Le Clip in France or La Dinamo in Spain. However, due to the slow pay-off of the initial group of projects, such alternative housing forms are sometimes facing an issue of scalability.
This relates to other criticisms, as some research suggests that projects often lack social diversity, with residents typically coming from white, middle-class backgrounds. While money may not always be the biggest barrier, access is often shaped by social networks, connections within alternative communities, and cultural capital. In some cases, collaborative projects have also been criticised for being inward-looking, focusing mainly on solidarity among its residents, while disregarding political struggles or needs of their own neighbourhood. As a result, they can contribute to gentrification or even resemble closed-off gated communities.
Postgrowth housing futures
To conclude, postgrowth offers a meaningful path towards transformation of housing, by challenging the centrality of urban property in the accumulation of capital. It is urgent that housing unaffordability is seen as a political, rather than a technical issue and that public affordable housing and tenant’s rights are prioritised. New developments need to reflect the needs of residents rather than interests of developers and investors.
Although collaborative housing is not a universal solution, it can support bottom-up housing mobilisation, democratic decision making and localised networks of mutual aid. Despite their imperfections, collaborative projects can contribute to postgrowth transformation through the diverse practice of housing commoning. Experimentation with environmental building, shared ownership and decision making can be seen as much needed attempts to create an alternative urban future from below, without growth at its core.