Decommodification of housing
Hamburg part I
I went to the Wohnprojekte-tage in Hamburg over the weekend to learn about their system of supporting co-building communities in the city. Friday afternoon was a seminar with prominent city town planners present, as well as academics, architects and mostly people interested in co-housing and living in co-housing projects. The debate turned to the big question of housing in Germany’s second biggest city, where building and housing prices are growing at a terrible speed. There is lot of pressure on the housing market, and especially on how to provide affordable and social housing, as in the other big cities in Germany.
Towards the end of the debate the issue of “decommodification” of housing came to the forefront. This is the idea, that housing should be removed from the market of goods to a sphere of use, in order to secure affordable rents in the long term. Which would be a highly radical solution in a neo-liberal world where wealth more and more is becoming concentrated and the urban housing market contributing strongly to this development, as shown by a.o. Picketty in the case of France. But is this possible? Isn’t this the romantic nostalgia of a dream born 30–40–50 years ago in the rural hippie communes and later also the urban squatter movement, which is incompatible with a capitalist world order? In Hamburg housing politics this is not necessarily so.
Mietshäuser Syndikat
One of the practical solutions to remove housing from market speculation is the Mietshäuser Syndikat. The Germany-wide organisation founded in Freiburg 1993, currently covers 131 housing projects which embrace “self-organized living and a solidarity-based economy”. The organisation makes sure the house projects have a sound financial plan and help projects achieve a certain professionality in order to be economically sustainable and also to provide for a solidarity-fund to be made available for new projects. What is crucial when you become a member of the Mietshäuser Syndikat is that your housing cooperative and the syndicate together become the owners of a limited liability company (GmbH), and the syndicate will veto any decision to sell the property. Thus the housing project should be secured for the tenants, and rents should not rise according to market logic.
We visited the GoMokry house project in the Mokrystrasse on our walking tour in Hamburg Wilhelmsburg. Beautiful young people in a fairly bare common room with book cases, stucco ceilings, a mirror ball and sound system, told us about their home which they have recently bought as common property to become part of the Mietshäuser Syndikat. The buildings consist of four large co-living communities, one on each floor, with a common ground floor mostly open to the neighbourhood including a spacious bar and coffee corner next to the room with the mirror ball. The project encourages direct loans from friends and families to avoid too much bank financing, but has bought the house with a bank loan. The intention is to pay off the bank loans as fast as possible and instead take up new direct private loans with a low interest. This is according to the motto “better 100 friends supporting your back (‘im Rücken’) than one bank at your neck”. Rent is organised according to a bidding principle, where people bid what they can afford. If this is not enough to cover the costs, the inhabitants will be asked to bid more until sufficient rent is collected. To maximise living space, the number of bathrooms and kitchens is minimised, and two buildings are joined together around one main staircase instead of two. This is also the principle for the new building called “the Rialto” to arise at a neighbouring lot, where the community will expand. Some people share sleeping rooms in order to free up space for a music room or other common facility.
Cooperative housing 30 years later
Hamburg has a long history of a leftist scene of cooperative housing, and GoMukry argue that they have learnt a lot from problems which arose in some of the 1980s highly politicized squats (See Vasudevan, 2017). Allegations of sexism and quite authoritarian organisation forms, have been discussed as the experience of the squatters has become history. The city authorities have also learnt from these grassroots housing actions that a more socially minded form of urban development was necessary. Thus arose a tradition of cooperative building and housing projects, which today facilitates and helps professionalise private groups of builders looking for living space. Eespecially housing large enough for families with children is very difficult to find with market mechanisms in the city, and receives financial support. The organisation facilitating the Wohnprojekte-tage , Stattbau Hamburg, was born as a socially minded urban redevelopment partner. Today the particular construct of the Mietshäuser Syndikat is outside the financial support framework for housing in Hamburg, but on its way into the system again, in order to ensure diversity and the social resource the housing form promises, in a vast number of big urban development areas on the way in Hamburg.
Today there are also community land trusts working in different ways to secure land Germany-wide for a different development, and the state discusses ways the authorities can lease public land instead of selling it off, another big topic at housing discussions in Hamburg. Decommodification of housing thus appears a higly legitimate concern and possible political strategy for today, not just outdated communist romanticism.
References:
Vasudevan, Alexander ‘The Autonomous City: A history of urban squatting’, Verso, London, 2017
‘Wohnen mit Zukunft: 30 Jahre Stattbau Hamburg’, Stattbau Hamburg Stadtentwicklungsgesellschaft mbH, 2016
‘Die Häuser denen, die drin wohnen: Das Miethäuser Syndikat und die Hausprojekte‘, Mietshäuser Syndikat, Freiburg, 2016
