Public administrations

We transform the housing model

The cooperative housing in right of use wants to promote new, more communal forms of coexistence, which enhance the interrelationship between the people who live in the building and also with the neighborhood or with people outside the cooperative, managing to build projects that live in their environment, while collaborating in its active dynamism.

These interactions can be created to different degrees, with neighborhood groups or entities that participate in some of the project spaces, as well as neighbors who make use of some of the facilities in the community spaces (laundry, workshop, multipurpose room, etc.). Ultimately, the aim is for the social cooperative housing project to go beyond the limits of its plot and positively influence its environment as a dynamizing agent for social initiatives.

We also consider that a model of coexistence that supports cooperative housing can become a solution to the problem of access to housing. In addition, promoting this model has a multiplier effect generating impact on the development of the city and the territory, as has been seen in precedents in other countries. It is a commitment to a transformative project that claims the permanence of cooperative values ​​and the social and solidarity economy : equality, fairness, democracy and self-organization.

Collaboration between the cooperative and the Local Administration is necessary to achieve the shared challenges of integrating a new housing model together with an active community and having an impact on the fabric of the social economy and on associative dynamics. We work for a social transformation towards a more just, supportive, sustainable context to make the right to housing effective through public-cooperative cooperation.

Public-cooperative collaboration

The advantages of the cooperative housing model in right of use are many and varied! Collaborating with entities like Sostre Cívic to promote cooperative housing, the Administration can…

• • Generate affordable and permanent housing from a public-cooperative and non-profit initiative.
  • Reduce public spending on housing, since management is transferred to the cooperative and, at the same time, it has the guarantee that access to these homes will be socially fair.
  • Contribute to the reactivation of disused heritage or that requires rehabilitation, without losing public ownership of the land or building. Socially favorable and sustainable disused heritage can be given new life!
  • Ensure the maintenance and continuous improvement of the heritage: the responsibility rests with the cooperative and the users.
  • Promote the social mix and the positive transformation of the neighborhood or municipality.
  • Participate in the creation of spaces for social and economic collaboration between society, administration and financial entities.

Strategies and actions

How to promote cooperative housing in right of use from the local administration?

1. Disseminate the model of cooperative housing in right of use.

• • • Organizing talks, debates, work tables to bring the model in right of use closer to the public.
    • Promoting in the housing offices alternative models of access and ownership of housing.
    • Distributing the informative documents made by Sostre Cívic with the support of the Administration.
    • Identifying groups interested in promoting a collective housing project.

2. Identify and register heritage opportunities.

• • • Looking for disused heritage of interest: obtaining plans, planning information, price, photographs...
    • Promoting a catalog of protected heritage or rural heritage.
    • Generating a report on empty or disused housing.
    • Opening a stock exchange of owners willing to start a collective project.

3. Promote co-operative housing in right of use to the municipality.

• • • Promoting previous feasibility studies on heritage opportunities in the municipality.
    • Constitutive of a right to the surface of a piece of land or property owned by the municipality in favor of the cooperative for an agreed period of time (maximum 75 years). Land allocation can be direct or through a public tender.
    • Signing a collaboration agreement with the cooperative to promote a joint project in the municipality.
    • Exercising the right of trial and retraction to recover assets from banking entities as a result of mortgage foreclosure and transfer them to the cooperative.
    • Advising and accompanying groups promoting new projects.
    • Financing the purchase of land or property by the cooperative.
    • Giving aid to the use fee and the entry contribution to the cooperative housing project in right of use.

4. Contribute to generating a network with agents from the territory, public administrations and private entities (municipal associations, cooperatives, Regional Council, Provincial Council, Ateneus Cooperatius, Generalitat, Catalan Housing Agency, etc.).

• • • Promoting the creation of housing tables in the region or municipality.
    • Organizing training activities in cooperative housing for Administration workers and/or interested people.
    • Encouraging the generation of relationship spaces between the different agents of the territory, such as meetings or conferences.

We make available to you the documents and guides that we have available in the downloads section so that you can help us spread the housing model in right of use.

If you need us to send you any other specific material, you can contact us at info@sostrecivic.cat