Could Zurich’s hoapplying cooperatives be the solution to the rest of Europe’s hoapplying crisis?

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-seeing hoapplying developments – architecturally smart, medium-rise, expensive-seeing in their design. This appears to be just another 21st-century development in a major city, a development that a builder has created 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 see 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 toobtainher 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 hoapplying in major cities across the countest.

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 hoapplying prices, no profit, no required for evictions and a structure that supports genuinely affordable hoapplying 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 utilize to provide hoapplying for people who can’t afford outright market rates. Zurich is rapid becoming a modern exemplar of how to utilize 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 purchaseing a returnable share between 7,000 and 25,000 Swiss francs (about £6,500 to £23,500) to join a cooperative and obtain a home. They then pay a “cost rent” which reflects the cost of repaying debts and maintaining the property.

Swiss cooperative hoapplying has a long history. The relocatement launched in the late 19th century, through workers’ relocatements pooling their wealth to purchase houtilizes that could offer them security amid the hoapplying speculation which was starting to take off in urban areas. In Zurich, the city’s first hoapplying 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 houtilize would be built. ABZ still exists today, owning 5,000 homes which houtilize 12,000 people.

The relocatement 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 toobtainher to raise development finance. A full-scale renaissance of the relocatement kicked off in Zurich in 2011 after a city-wide referfinishum set a tarobtain that a third of the city’s hoapplying 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 obtain 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 purchases up to 20% of the shares in a cooperative, which gives it rights to hoapplying that it then offers to homeless houtilizeholds 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 hoapplying, integration of disadvantaged houtilizeholds and tenant participation and self-determination”.

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The legal structure of cooperatives means each member has a single vote in decision-building, 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 utilized 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 straightforward model to create work financially: older buildings will eventually required improvement work, which cautilizes 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 requireded to be factored in.

Could such a model work in the UK? There is no reason to consider it wouldn’t. Indeed, there is an existing network of compact, 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 hoapplying – so we didn’t required it to grow. But with social hoapplying provision stalling and hoapplying 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.

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