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

Abstract

The article tells the story of Danish cooperative housing's radical transformation from a collective housing good and commons to a financialized asset during the 2000s when neoliberal housing reforms were introduced and the mortgage finance market was deregulated. Processes of financialization of collectively owned housing have to be understood not only in relation to the dynamics of the surrounding housing market and political-economic changes but also to the communities and social relations that they presuppose and feed off, often in contradictory ways, as people are motivated by both solidarity and private interests. Housing cooperatives have existed as a form of collective housing throughout the 20th century, balanced, on the one hand, between the reproduction of kin, family and local communities and the common good and, on the other, between the market and the reproduction of the base for both families, local communities and the larger public sharing the housing commons. During the 2000s, processes of financialization brought the market and the cooperatives' base so close together, primarily through new mortgaging opportunities, that families and communities have lost their savings and the base has been undermined, both in a material and an immaterial sense.

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

“…Interestingly, the reader predicted that housing cooperatives in a capitalist society would eventually be capitalized. Some twenty years later, this was exactly what befell Danish housing cooperatives (Bruun, 2018;Larsen & Lund Hansen, 2015), but how this has affected cohousing based on cooperative tenure remains to be analysed.…”

Who Owns Collaborative Housing? A Conceptual Typology of Property Regimes

“…Still, both commonly or externally vested income rights are not individually sufficient conditions for the decommodification of housing on the long-run. A limited-equity cooperative may financialize through tenure conversion (Bruun 2018). Income rights thus need support from a non-profit orientation and restrictions on marketization cemented in bylaws or statutes.…”

Balancing the formal and the informal: the relational challenges of everyday practices of co-operation in shared housing co-operatives in the UK

“…Technically, this latter situation should not be possible, as the legal framework under which an ownership housing co-operative operates in the UK means that its assets must be passed to another co-op if it folds (Radical Routes, 2015). These stories may then have served largely as cautionary tales (although Huron, 2015;Bruun, 2018 provide examples of the privatisation of co-operative housing in the US and Denmark, respectively).…”