Facing problems of gentrification and increased housing costs, many communities have turned housing into commons
Jason Hopper has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focused on community building and art in Bhutan. Currently Jason works in research and evaluation in Portland.
Changing the world we live in requires being able to imagine a different one. As more people in our country get vaccinated and the pandemic seems more under control, a return to normal does not seem good enough to me. And so I have found myself looking for ideas and examples that could help me think through, what, exactly, a better normal might look like.
I believe the commons, as both an idea and a term for a set of historical practices, offers a way forward. Commons are resources that are collectively held and maintained for the benefit of a community by that community. Commons are institutions that are distinct from either the state, as they are self-governed, or the market, as they are not private property nor are they used for profit.
As an idea, the commons focuses on organizing economic life around meeting needs, reciprocity, cooperation, collective action and ownership of resources and systems that allow everyone to flourish. Often proponents of the commons understand “everyone” broadly to include all human society as well as the natural world and non-human beings. As a principle, the commons critiques our economic system, which relies on greed, perpetual consumption, growth and private property to make it work, and which tells us that these features of life are fundamental, even the defining feature of what it means to be human.
To many this style of thinking seems overly romantic, even dangerously impractical. Critics of the commons use the idea of the “tragedy of the commons” to argue that because people will inevitably overexploit any shared resource because human beings always act primarily out of self-interest. However, the idea of the “tragedy of the commons” overlooks the many examples of real-world commons that work quite well and that the introduction of capitalist systems, not the commons themselves, drives many of the tragedies we seek to remedy. To bring this discussion back down to Earth a little, let’s look at the commons in regard to the topic of housing.
Finding a way to make housing more affordable and to work against gentrification can seem like an impossible task. Partly, this is because state policies and market forces often work together to drive gentrification and displacement. Urban planner and geographer Samuel Stein shows how the fundamental focus on property values shared by both government and business has effectively led to a real estate state that reproduces gentrification despite the best intentions of urban planners. Under capitalism, the state and the market are often not so much opposites, as they are partners. Seeing the problem of housing in terms of state and market solutions might lead us down a dead end.
Facing problems of gentrification and increased housing costs, many communities have turned housing into commons. In her 2018 book, “Carving Out the Commons,” Professor Amanda Huron argues the cooperative housing movement in Washington, D.C., provides an example of a real world, commons approach to housing. She describes the history and practice of limited equity cooperatives, or LECs. In a limited equity cooperative (LEC), residents purchase shares in the cooperative and pay a monthly fee proportional to apartment size that covers the mortgage, property taxes, building maintenance and often utilities. When someone moves out, they get back the price of the shares they initially bought, adjusted for inflation. Members of the cooperative own their living space and collectively manage the building and common areas.
Unlike condominiums, which also have elements of shared ownership, LECs are a type of “resale restricted housing.” Residents of LECs cannot sell their apartment or their share for a profit. At most, residents’ share prices will be adjusted for inflation. Limiting the opportunity for profit from ownership prevents speculation and keeps the cost of rent low for current and future residents. Also unlike condominiums, LECs in D.C. specifically aim to provide affordable housing to low-income residents. Huron’s research found that in 2011, a one- or two-bedroom apartment ran at about half the market rate.
The case of LECs in Washington, D.C., offers an example of how in practice the commons always work in conversation with existing social structures, which today means the state and the market. The success of limited equity cooperatives relied on working with the state and the market. Activism for tenant rights by low-income and Black residents in Washington, D.C., helped push for state policies that gave tenants the right to purchase their homes at market rates and provided other leverage for tenants to keep their housing at an affordable rate. Furthermore, the city offered tenant organizations low-cost loans, provided they created limited equity cooperative housing for the duration of the loan.
Looking at Huron’s study suggests different ways forward to address housing than typical state and market solutions. For example, in addition to building more housing, requiring developers to allocate a certain number of affordable units, or focusing on individual home ownership, we might limit the rising costs, help low-income residents, and create stability for communities by creating ways for tenants to collectively own housing. Likewise, LECs suggest we should look for other ways to limit the treatment of housing as a commodity in order to help decrease rising costs.
The commons, however, are neither a utopia nor a magic bullet. They require hard work to create and must be worked out in the context of our mixed state and market economy. Commons are also full, as any collective human action is, of their own challenges and shortcomings. Commoners argue and disagree with each other and their neighbors. They require skill and hard work to run well. Commons do sometimes fail. But they also offer a way forward to think about human needs and flourishing, to work collectively rather than individually to meet those needs, to treat each other more humanely, and to both a more democratic form of economic organization and an economy that supports democracy.
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