Housing cooperative

In equity cooperatives, occupancy rights are sometimes granted by way of the purchase agreements and legal instruments registered on the title.

As a legal entity, a co-op can contract with other companies or hire individuals to provide it with services, such as a maintenance contractor or a building manager.

It can also hire employees, such as a manager or a caretaker, to deal with specific upkeep tasks at which volunteers may hesitate or may not be skilled, such as electrical maintenance.

Whichever form of voting is employed it is necessary to conduct an election among shareholders to determine who will represent them on the board of directors (if one exists), the governing body of the co-operative.

A housing cooperative's board of directors is elected by the membership, providing a voice and representation in the governance of the property.

Rules are determined by the board, providing a flexible means of addressing the issues that arise in a community to assure the members' peaceful possession of their homes.

[7] A housing cooperative is normally de facto non-profit, since usually most of its income comes from the rents paid by its residents (if in a formal corporation, then shareholders), who are invariably its members.

In the lifecycle of buildings, the replacement of assets (capital repairs) requires significant funds which can be obtained through a variety of ways: assessments on current owners; sales of Treasury Stock (former rental units) to new shareholders; draw downs of reserves; unsecured loans; operating surpluses; fees on the sales of units between shareholders and new and increases to existing mortgages.

[8][failed verification] Other research among older residents from the rural United States found that those living in housing cooperatives felt much safer, independent, satisfied with life, had more friends, had more privacy, were healthier and had things repaired faster.

[15] In 2013, the opening of La Maison des Babayagas, an innovative housing co-op in Paris, gained worldwide attention.

It was formed as a self-help community and built with financial assistance from the municipal government, specifically for female senior citizens.

[citation needed] Generally, the association's activities are tied to the purpose above, in particular, the development of a popular entity called the University of Knowledge of the Elderly (UNISAVIE: Université du savoir des vieux), and the initiation of a movement to promote other living places that are organized into similar networks.

Monthly meetings assure the optimal routines of the building and ensure that each person may participate fully and with complete liberty of expression.

Plans set out the routine intervention of a mediator who could help get to the bottom of the causes of eventual conflicts in order to allow for their resolution.

A (house) owners' association (Vereniging van Eigenaren, VvE) is by Dutch law established wherever there are separately owned apartments in one building.

These loans will then be paid off during a fixed period of years (typically 20 to 30), and once this is done, the cooperative is dispersed and the flats are transformed into condominiums.

[citation needed] A tenant-owner's association (Swedish: bostadsrättsförening, Norwegian: borettslag, Danish: andelsboligforening) is a legal term used in the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway) for a type of joint ownership of property in which the whole property is owned by a co-operative association, which in its turn is owned by its members.

The Finnish arrangement is similar to a housing cooperative in that the property is owned by a non-profit corporation and the right to use each unit is tied to ownership of a certain set of shares.

The Catalyst Collective provides information about starting co-operatives in the UK and explains the legal structure of a housing coop.

With a presence in over 100 towns and cities across North America, NASCO has provided tens of thousands of students with sustainable housing.

[35] Cooperatives have a long history in metropolitan New York – in November 1882, Harper's Magazine describes several cooperative apartment buildings already in existence, with plans to build more[37] – and can be found throughout New York City, Westchester County, which borders the city to the north, and towns in northern New Jersey that are close to Manhattan, including Fort Lee, Edgewater, Ramsey, Passaic and Weehawken.

Reasons suggested to explain why cooperatives are relatively more common than condominiums in the New York City area are:[38] Most of the housing cooperatives in the greater New York area were converted to that status during the 1980s; generally, they were large buildings built between the 1920s and 1950s that a single landlord or corporation owned and rented out that became unprofitable as rental properties.

In the 1990s and 2000s some rental buildings in the Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach areas went through a similar conversion process, though not to the degree of New York.

Many of the cooperatives originally built as co-ops were sponsored by trade unions, such as the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.

The United Housing Foundation was set up in 1951 and built Co-op City in The Bronx, designed by architect Herman Jessor.

Another dynamic also contributed to the large number of cooperatives established in the 1980s and 1990s in New York City – in this case by low- and moderate-income tenant groups.

In the 1970s, many New York City private landlords were struggling to maintain their aging properties in the face of high interest rates, redlining, white flight and rising fuel costs.

[44][45] The period also saw some landlord-induced arson to obtain insurance proceeds and widespread non-payment of real estate taxes – over 20% of multi-family residential properties were in arrears in the mid-1970s.

[43] Working with the city's housing agency, its existing loan programs and the power to dispose of abandoned property to non-profit organizations, as well as the state laws governing the establishment of co-operatives, UHAB was able to provide low-income people with the tools – seed money, legal advice, architectural plans, bookkeeping training – to build and run limited-equity housing co-operatives.

Through a long-standing contract with the city to provide training and technical assistance to residents of buildings in the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) Program, UHAB has worked with more than 1,600 coops, preserving over 30,000 units of affordable housing.