Children zoom down a tunnel slide, as their parents watch on, sipping coffees and chatting amicably on the long benches in the middle of the courtyard.
They are surrounded by modern-looking housing developments – architecturally smart, medium-rise, expensive-looking in their design. This appears to be just another 21st-century development in a major city, a development that a builder has made a tidy profit out of, and flats that will have inevitably been snapped up by landlords and rented out at the highest market rate.
But look a little closer, and things are different.
There are more children, more families than you would find in a development like this in London. People seem to know one another, neighbours greet each other warmly and are sitting together outside, rather than dashing to the metro station with earbuds jammed in.
Inside, some of the flats are arranged in clusters: eight bedrooms opening out into a communal space where neighbours cook, chat and share meals. There are a larger number of working class, poorer and ethnic-minority residents than you might expect to find in a development like this in a major city.
This is the Mehr als Wohnen cooperative in Zurich, Switzerland: a collection of 13 blocks of apartments that represent a different way of developing housing in major cities across the country.
The buildings are all owned by a cooperative, which developed them. And the cooperative is owned by the people who live in the flats and have bought a share in the business. The result is no landlord, no speculative property developer, no soaring housing prices, no profit, no need for evictions and a structure that supports genuinely affordable housing and communal living. The cooperative includes shops, workspaces, a restaurant, a children’s nursery and a hotel. It has a no-car policy, supplemented by electric car and ebike rental systems. It could not feel more different from the UK.
In many parts of the world, a cooperative such as this is not some kind of utopian dream. Actually, it’s the primary means societies from Scandinavia to South America use to provide housing for people who can’t afford outright market rates. Zurich is fast becoming a modern exemplar of how to use this model to build a different kind of city.
One in every five citizens in Zurich now lives in a cooperative – meaning they have bought a share in the company that built and owns their apartment block. This means that despite being a major global financial hub and pleasantly located on the edge of a large lake, poorer, younger people, families and students can still find somewhere they can afford in the centre of the city.
The model today involves members buying a returnable share between 7,000 and 25,000 Swiss francs (about £6,500 to £23,500) to join a cooperative and get a home. They then pay a “cost rent” which reflects the cost of repaying debts and maintaining the property.
Swiss cooperative housing has a long history. The movement began in the late 19th century, through workers’ movements pooling their wealth to buy houses that could offer them security amid the housing speculation which was starting to take off in urban areas. In Zurich, the city’s first housing cooperative, Waidberg, was founded in 1907, and others soon followed, including Allgemeine Baugenossenschaft Zürich (ABZ), which was founded in 1916, when 15 members started paying 20 cents each into an account. As soon as enough money had been raised, a new house would be built. ABZ still exists today, owning 5,000 homes which house 12,000 people.
The movement grew after the second world war, supported by national and local governments, which offered favourable land leases and loans. The businesses became more sophisticated from the 1990s onwards, clubbing together to raise development finance. A full-scale renaissance of the movement kicked off in Zurich in 2011 after a city-wide referendum set a target that a third of the city’s housing be cooperative-owned by 2050.
Since then, cooperatives have had priority access to land that is either leased to them by the city or gifted. They get low-interest loans and favourable treatment in the city’s zonal planning system. They also have access to some globally respected architects, with the developments gaining a reputation for being “examples of outstanding architectural and ecological quality”.
In some instances, the city also buys up to 20% of the shares in a cooperative, which gives it rights to housing that it then offers to homeless households for lower rents.
The cooperatives are all signed up to a joint charter which demands the adoption of principles such as “no speculative profits, good-quality affordable and sustainable housing, integration of disadvantaged households and tenant participation and self-determination”.
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The legal structure of cooperatives means each member has a single vote in decision-making, which means the collective cooperative is democratically run by its residents. This can be difficult: managing a building is hard, and the democratic model is a commitment of time that UK citizens would not be used to. But it does mean that decisions about their buildings are taken by them – not imposed by a landlord or freeholder.
It is also not always an easy model to make work financially: older buildings will eventually need improvement work, which causes rents to rise. And for newly built projects, rising construction costs have pushed up rents, while a scarcity of land means growth is slowing and demand is outstripping supply.
This has led to accusations that they are not affordable, and in fact cater to wealthier renters and drive gentrification. Even with these flaws, the model is cheaper than it would have been if a landlord’s profit margin also needed to be factored in.
Could such a model work in the UK? There is no reason to think it wouldn’t. Indeed, there is an existing network of small, thriving cooperatives here, which trace their history back decades.
Part of the reason why it has never become mainstream is that we arguably did something better – council housing – so we didn’t need it to grow. But with social housing provision stalling and housing demand higher than ever, the cooperative model provides a glimpse of an alternative to our broken system. It is one we could at least explore.
