MEET THE MEMBERS

I approached cooperative housing in a moment of existential crisis. In 2015 I had been in Greece during the refugee crisis and when I came back I had a really bad time. I wanted to make a change and decided to co-operate my life. I started by becoming Som Energia and More Opcions, and one day reading an article I came across Sostre Cívic. Their project at that time was still living in the world of dreams because there was no building built, but I became a partner and I was lucky that the City Council immediately held a competition for lots. We did a dynamic in October 2016 to form the group for each site and I took the one in Poblenou. I met many of the people who are now my neighbors, and we started working on the concession of the plot and then on the construction of La Balma.

He had been living in a rented flat in Gràcia for years. She was lucky because the owner was a woman who did not make the two flats she had profitable. He rented it to me at a time when I was very sick, I had cirrhosis and had to have a liver transplant. I was there for fifteen years and my rent was never raised above the annual CPI. Something very unusual in this city.

Alicia at home, a La Balma

I didn't have the residential need to enter such a project, but I had the emotional need to live in a different way. I considered a life change and housing was part of that change. All his life he had dreamed of this way of life, but he did not see it as a reality. There was the option of going to a community outside of Barcelona, ​​but I'm sick and I need a hospital nearby. Also, I have my daughter and granddaughters here.

Although I am a person who has a lot of inner life and I value my solitude a lot, since living here I am much better as we have a very full community life.

However, this does not mean that we are all together for a long time; living together means you have your affinity group, but also other people from hello and goodbye. On the other hand, when it comes to making decisions we are all one: we agree, we have things in common, we have community meals, work days and we develop governance through commissions, working groups and a board.

Common room of La Balma © Milena Villalba

I was on a lot of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medication because I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder since I was young. A year ago I realized I was no longer taking the anti-anxiety meds and decided to talk to my doctor to see what he thought about going off the anti-depressants as well. I had been taking sleeping pills for twenty-five years, but now that I live in La Balma I don't need anything to sleep or antidepressants. While there are some medications I can't stop because of my transplant, everything else I'm no longer on and I'm delighted.

This has to do with the company. La Balma it is a building that is meant to be found, no matter how much you don't look for it. When you talk to mothers, they all tell you the same thing - I guess fathers too, but I deal more with women - that their lives are much calmer and accompanied, that their sons and daughters don't require so much of their time because when the boys and girls come home from school, they meet, have breakfast together, look for each other...

Portal of La Balma © Milena Villalba

If they have to do something, they know they can leave the older ones alone at home because I or another neighbor is next door. To me at I had an operation in December and I have a neighbor who is a nurse and I didn't have to go to the CAP because she took care of me.

It is a model in which care is given in a very organic way. However, gender inequalities are also present: emotional and cohabitation care commissions are always highly contested and care outside the family falls to women. I have been ill and no man has come to ask me how I am; while all the ladies in the building did come. For that, Sostre Cívic we are drawing up a protocol against sexist violence.

Totally. I need to be very close to children and young people; this feeds me and enriches me. I like to surround myself with young people because they open your mind and make you aware that there are several ways to live, and that yours is not the right one, it is simply another option. I very consciously chose to be in an intergenerational community, but I don't know if my life will end in a senior housing project [dedicated exclusively to the elderly], since in interage housing there is no talk of old age care. When I tried to introduce the issue, I was told that we will talk about it and find solutions the moment something happens. This is also one of the lessons I learned: to have confidence in the group. I fully trust that if something happens, we will find a way to fix it. We will all get old so I hope the solution is collective and not individual.

The only way to guarantee real diversity in cooperative housing projects - both functional and intellectual diversity, as well as a greater presence of migrated people - is that there is public aid for the initial contributions, which although they are just starting to go down, they are still very high - in the case of La Balma these ranged between 29.000 and 45.000 euros. Young people, who barely earn a thousand euros a month, cannot save this money. There should be some other way. For example, in Germany, the contribution is made by the state.

Alice in her home La Balma © Milena Villalba

The dream is that this will not stop. This is a very interesting model because it is based on non-speculation: ownership is collective, we are not owners, but users, and we cannot sell or transfer or re-rent the flat, but we can live in it as long as we want . Young people must see that there are other ways of living beyond buying and renting. The more co-operative housing there is and the more social housing is built, the easier it will be for housing not to be as tremendous a form of speculation as it is now.