Sostre Cívic and the Tenants' Union present their agreement with the aim of building an alternative to real estate.

The first debate between the two entities outlines a shared agenda with the horizon of co-operating blocks of struggling tenants.

Last Thursday, September 28, the social headquarters of the Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular de Barcelona (Reina Amàlia, 38) hosted the presentation of the first agreement between cooperativism and trade unionism for the right to housing. Sostre Cívic and the Tenants' Union presented the framework of their first agreement, which unites both social bases in a stable collaboration aimed at consolidating the fight for access to decent housing.

This historic alliance in our country between cooperativism and housing unionism has already taken place in other countries, which have a long history of defending and promoting affordable housing. But in Catalonia, this pact has arrived when the two movements are in a relatively premature phase: the Tenants' Union has only been around for 7 years and Sostre Cívic (although as an entity it is 20 years old) it was only 8 years ago that it launched its first cooperative housing project. This precocious willingness to walk together is explained by the need to raise an alternative to reverse the historical (almost monopolistic) prioritization that has been done in the Spanish state of the real estate ownership model. Being an owner has been imposed as the only aspiration to achieve the right to housing. Carmen Arcarazo, spokesman for Union of Tenants, said to denounce thus that the promotion of a society of owners has been done at cost "to erase from the map other imaginaries of ownership" what is cooperative housing in right of use.

Regarding the agreement, the spokeswoman for the Union explained that one of the central points is the figure of the affiliate-collaborator. All members of the cooperative will be counted, from now on, as members of the Union. This increase in representation will allow the union to have more strength vis-à-vis owners' organizations and institutions, while encouraging membership among co-operatives. This collaboration model fits in with the Union's line of transforming individual conflicts into collective conflicts, organizing tenants by blocks or to be subject to the same property. "One of the first milestones that we can propose starting today is to study the feasibility so that these blogs that are currently fighting against a price increase can take the fight one step further and move towards co-operating their blog ", he cheered.

Yabel Pérez, member of Governing Council de Sostre Cívic, presented the cooperative to the affiliates of the Union. With more than 1300 partners, 170 already living together and nearly 400 homes under way for the next few years, it made self-organization on the basis of collective ownership an alternative to the private market, but also to the shortcomings of the administration, to guarantee the right to housing. That the management of real estate assets is in the hands of their own users is the most effective way to avoid speculation and prioritize the interests of the community. He also added that the cooperative's work goes beyond building homes: "it's about building communities of mutual support networked with the neighborhoods and the environment that surrounds them; in building homes with low environmental impact and resilient to climate change, in shared sustainable mobility projects and in conscious consumption". It is in this logic, he explains, that from the cooperative they are committed to growing alliances with the movement for the right to housing.

What can trade unionism and cooperativism contribute to each other?

The presentations of the two entities gave rise to the presentation of Lorenzo Vidal, researcher in public policy at the UNED and expert in housing cooperatives, who introduced the debate on what cooperativism and the right to housing can contribute to each other according to different international experiences of longer history. 

The first idea that, according to Vidal, must be shared between the two movements is the horizon of ceasing to be a tenant. Without this horizon, trade unionism can end up becoming mere defensive and corporatist organizations. New imaginaries must be constructed to erase real estate from the tenant's aspirational horizon. In this sense, cooperativism can contribute to trade unionism its experience in building infrastructures of collective ownership and popular management. vto use as an example the cooperative movement of Uruguay, which during the dictatorship was key to building spaces of resistance in the community premises of their homes.

On the other hand, trade unionism needs to imbue cooperativism with its militant culture and practice "in a context in which the dominant relations are those of the market and property". And he gave the example of Uruguay again, where the cooperativists during their long career have developed a whole repertoire of protest, from land occupations to strikes to pay abusive interest, because the administrations gave public resources to cooperatives to facilitate their affordability and access to the low-income population. Another very important contribution that trade unionism can make to cooperativism is strengthening "subjectivity as housing users" and prevent the balance from tipping towards something like being communities of owners, however collective that may be. Experience, especially in Nordic countries, shows that many times the cooperative members end up treating the cooperative patrimony as exclusively theirs and not as a common patrimony from which the rest of society has the right not to be excluded.

Beyond Uruguay, Vidal he also put Denmark as a benchmark to look up to, where in just under 30 years 30% of the total housing stock in a capital like Copenhagen became co-operatives "without the need to raise a revolutionary movement". This was thanks to a political agenda of shared measures between the housing rights movement and co-operativeism, which made the rentism of the owners not to pay for them and to get rid of their properties at an affordable price: strong regulation of prices, pressure to rehabilitate properties, right of first refusal for block tenants, etc. According to this experience, in Catalonia "cooperativism needs to adopt the demands of trade unionism, such as the regulation of rents, not as solidarity with the movement, but out of shared self-interest" and also be aware that new construction is a limited way to expand the right of use model. It is necessary to expand the right of trial and retraction to rehabilitate disused private properties and prohibit the horizontal division of property. 

Later, these and other ways were shared and deepened in a short, but intense debate, where cooperativists and trade unionists left evidence of an incipient enthusiasm for the new opportunities opened up by this new alliance in the field of housing. Despite this, there are still challenges to overcome, such as the need for more public support and recognition to ensure the affordability of affordable co-operative housing to broad segments of the population. In any case, the first stone of a new culture for the right to housing has already been laid.