A lakhatási válságra adott közösségi válaszok
Community Responses to the Housing Crisis

The possibility of tenant cooperatives in Hungary

Summary/Abstract: Since the crisis of 2008, housing is yet again and increasingly becoming a form of profitable financial investment. This tends to dominate over the claim that each person has the need and the right to access affordable, good quality housing. Across the globe this tendency is intensified by state policies as well. However, bottom-up initiatives organizing themselves for collective housing solutions are also gaining ground. These self-organized, „self-help” models open the possibility for economically vulnerable social groups to support each other in finding solutions for their housing problems, and also to collectively access resources that would individually be impossible to reach. This paper presents such an alternative housing solution, notably the model of rental-based housing cooperatives. Rental housing cooperatives are institutions organized in a bottom-up manner with the aim of providing affordable, good quality and stable housing for their members. We discuss two examples from Germany and from Uruguay for successful rental housing cooperative networks, which have existed for several decades. Finally, we present the steps which have been taken in the past years in Hungary and in the Eastern European region towards the establishment of such a model.

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