Commodifying danish housing commons

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Housing was a backbone of the Danish welfare state, but this has been profoundly challenged by the past decades of neoliberal housing politics. In this article we outline the rise of the Danish model of association-based housing on the edge of the market economy (and the state). From this we demonstrate how homes in private cooperatives through political interventions in context of a booming real estate market have plunged into the market economy and been transformed into private commodities in all but name, and we investigate how non-profit housing associations frontally and stealthily are attacked through neoliberal reforms. This carries the seeds for socio-spatial polarization and may eventually open the gate for commodification -and thus the dismantling of the little that is left of a socially just housing sector. Yet, while the association-based model was an accessary to the commodification of cooperative housing, it can possibly be an accomplice in sustaining non-profit housing as a housing commons.

For the Benefit of Everyone? : Explaining the Significance of Swedish Public Housing for Urban Housing Inequality

“…Several other scholars show how the financial benefits for constructing owned housing and converting rented housing to operatively owned have led to a decrease in affordable rental apartments in Sweden, having implications for the character of public housing (Clark, 2013;Salonen, 2015b) and the national SHP. These scholars argue that housing is being decoupled from welfare policy, exemplified by the change of public housing, which as Larsen and Lund Hansen (2015) describe, was once a bastion of the social democratic welfare state in the Nordic countries-a bastion that, according to some, seemingly sets a new tone. Hedin et al (2012) argue that the marketization of public housing has contributed to the whole Swedish housing sector becoming increasingly neo-liberal.…”

“…It could be argued that Sweden and Denmark is following the same path of competitive marketization of universal public housing. But while universal in principle, Denmark's public housing is still state subsidized, in return for allocating 25% of their stock to low-income households (See, e.g., Nielsen, 2010;Jensen, 2013;Larsen and Lund Hansen, 2015). The development leaves, in my reading, Sweden as the only remaining 'true' integrated rental market and universal housing regime in Europe.…”

Three phases of Danish cohousing: tenure and the development of an alternative housing form

“…This tenure takes the form of limited equity cooperatives in which the property is owned collectively by an association. Members of such housing cooperatives have a right of use to a dwelling, and membership is accessed through the purchase of a 'share' (andel), which is valued by set formulae outlined by law rather than 'free' market value (Bruun, 2011;Larsen & Lund Hansen, 2015). This form of tenure was revitalized when legislation in 1975 gave tenants a first option (tilbudspligt) to buy existing rental housing and form a housing cooperative, should their landlord choose to sell (Jonasson, 2010).…”

“…For a start, there is the problem of identifying tenure 'types' and dealing with the bewildering differences between ostensibly similar typologies across jurisdictions (Ruonavaara, 1993). Even in a small country, like Denmark, 'owner-occupied' covers several different and historically contingent forms of property relations, for example, while 'housing cooperative' has significantly different meanings when applied to, say, Denmark, Norway and Sweden (Larsen & Lund Hansen, 2015;Sørvoll & Bengtsson, 2018). More fundamentally, as argued by Barlow & Duncan (1988), conceptions of housing tenure can be misused in several ways, for example to assume that taxonomic tenure types correspond to substantive categories such as social status.…”

The financialization of Danish cooperatives and the debasement of a collective housing good

“…Housing cooperatives are a form of 'collective private property' (Larsen and Hansen, 2015) between rental and owner-occupied housing. In 1975, tenants received a collective right of first refusal when private landlords put their rental estates up for sale.…”