A path to housing justice through housing cooperatives and community land trusts
Unless you have been asleep somewhere off-world, you will be aware that Australia has a persistent and growing lack of affordable, appropriate housing. As a result of decades of policies and incentives that have prioritised the treatment of homes as financialised assets, growing numbers of Australians find it hard to secure decent homes to own or rent. This has knock-on effects throughout the housing system, including the creation of relentless and impossible pressure on a social housing system that has been underfunded in real terms for the past three decades. It also places upwards pressure on private rentals, with the Anglicare rental affordability snapshot worsening year on year. The 2025 snapshot showed that 0.7 per cent of rentals were affordable for a person on a full-time minimum wage, 0.3 per cent for people on the Aged Pension, and none for someone on Youth Allowance. In a country that prides itself on the idea of a fair go, these figures are appalling.
Amidst this growing pressure, there have been persistent calls for tax reform to remove the disproportionate subsidisation of property investment and increase funding for social housing, both of which should be non-negotiable minimum components of effective policy. Alongside these well-documented responses to the impact of financialisation, Australia also needs to diversify its housing system to include a greater range of options that can provide dignity, stability and autonomy in housing without presuming that these can only be provided through market-rate ownership.
Housing cooperatives are one such option and have a history and ongoing presence in Australia, including targeted support via the 8th Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement over 1984‒89. That agreement included the Local Government and Community Housing Program, which, while modest, enabled the growth of a community housing sector that included housing cooperatives as an affordable rental model. Alongside the affordable rental housing cooperatives, there is a tiny but diverse range of housing cooperatives in which residents invest various degrees of equity. This history can form the basis for expansion and diversification. It has the capacity to address a swathe of current housing issues and would also bring us into line with other countries that have more extensive housing cooperative sectors.
What are housing cooperatives?
Housing cooperatives are member-based organisations that operate under the ‘one member—one vote’ principle. Australia’s history of cooperatives comprises two primary sets of entities—one focuses on providing members with access to finance to build or buy a home, the other on members collaborating to undertake various aspects of buying, building, living in and managing the cooperative’s houses.
The first of the two clusters of organisations in Australia encompasses cooperative housing or building societies and a variety of credit and savings societies that provide loans to low and middle-income people. While these have an almost 200-year bumpy history, including a lack of regulation and the collapse of some societies, they have played an important role, especially post-Second World War, in enabling low-income Australians to access finance to build or buy their own house. In their peak in the mid-1960s and combined with tax incentives, the cooperative building societies provided finance for between 35‒40 per cent of private housing and thereby contributed to a substantial rise in private home ownership between 1900 and the 1970s. With a primary focus on providing finance, these societies were geared towards expanding private home ownership, but not necessarily affordability or quality in the homes that were bought or built with these funds.
The second cluster, housing cooperatives, is an organisational form constituted to own, govern and/or manage physical housing stock, where members of the cooperative live in and manage the housing cooperative together. Members in a housing cooperative may initially focus on such issues as design, construction and affordability, while ongoing member roles include governance, management and maintenance of their housing. Housing cooperative members do not individually own their homes but, through their membership, have exclusive and long-term rights of occupancy and a voice in co-op governance. Most of Australia’s housing cooperatives are rental or zero-equity cooperatives in which residents invest no equity, or only a nominal amount, and then pay rent to the cooperative. These affordable rental housing cooperatives (ARHCs) are part of the social housing system, with rent policies varying between and within states. In some programs, rents are indexed at 25 to 30 per cent of household income, up to a maximum of market rent, while in others, rents are set at a maximum of 74.9 per cent of market rent.
According to 2024 research, ARHCs accounted for just over 3700 homes in 184 ARHCs across Australia; this is roughly 0.3 per cent of Australia’s total housing stock. The average size of households in ARHCs is around 20 units per co-op, which is very small compared to larger rental housing cooperative sectors in Denmark (114 units per co-op) and Switzerland (135 units per co-op). There were also 25 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cooperatives, providing just under 1300 homes. These very small overall numbers are similar to US and UK numbers and are dwarfed by the housing cooperative sectors in Norway (15 per cent of housing stock) and Sweden (22 per cent). It is worth noting that the latter countries do not have strata titling, and it is possible that housing cooperatives are occupying a similar space in those countries.
Alongside the ARHC sector, Australia has a longstanding history of various forms of housing cooperative where members do invest equity. While not necessarily aimed at affordability, some have managed to create affordability by virtue of their location or construction type. In contrast to the large-scale housing cooperatives of Norway and Sweden, Australia’s equity housing cooperatives are small, both at the individual organisational level and as an overall sector. In Australia, equity housing cooperatives are often the basis for intentional communities, such as ecovillages or cohousing developments with social and environmental objectives.
Building the case for housing cooperatives
Housing cooperatives are said to generate a range of benefits beyond stable housing. In research we undertook, we confirmed this, finding various immediate and longer-term positive outcomes for co-op residents. These were in a feedback loop driven by members’ sense of empowerment, and by a cluster of phenomena we termed ‘co-operativism’. This term encompasses residents’ active participation in their cooperative, their commitment to cooperative principles, and their active desire to live in a housing cooperative . Housing satisfaction, a sense of home, skills development, education and employment outcomes, a sense of community and connection, health and wellbeing, and broader social outcomes were some of the immediate benefits of housing cooperativism.
Longer-term and higher-order outcomes, such as ‘voice’, agency and empowerment, were also identified. These outcomes were in a positive feedback loop, with the immediate benefits of housing co-ops and with the residents’ level of cooperativism.
In this research, it was clear that the outcomes of living in cooperative housing were fundamentally shaped by residents’ experiences of participating in their cooperative. The form of participation did not matter—this could be anything from almost no managerial responsibility, with most participation being in social events, through to being involved in all aspects of governance and management, alongside social events. The driving determinant of outcomes was residents’ satisfaction with their own and others’ participation, especially whether they felt participation was equitable. This included their awareness that their own and other cooperative members’ capacity to contribute would vary over time.
Active membership in cooperative settings correlated with a greater sense of home, community and safety, as well as opportunities to develop skills, often transferable to better employment. A focus on housing outcomes alone—such as affordability and stability—overlooks those critical and desirable longer-term and higher-order impacts such as personal agency and empowerment. A simple example of how the bigger picture might be missed is where stable housing is conflated with secure housing. A resident might be in a very stable housing situation in terms of tenure, but have no voice and lack agency or empowerment over their living conditions. For example, they may not have the right or ability to decorate their home, typical of many mainstream rental situations, and thus actually be adversely affected by their housing.
We found that the positive feedback between empowerment, cooperativism and other beneficial outcomes held across diverse locations and forms, meaning that there is no one ‘right’ form of cooperative. Likewise, we found there was no one ‘right’ level or form of participation, as satisfaction held across different cooperatives’ varied levels of responsibility for repairs, maintenance and tenancy matters. What mattered was whether residents felt these arrangements were fair and what they wanted, recognising that members go through periods when they are less able to actively participate.
A cooperative thrives when assisted to be the type of cooperative members want it to be. This is important for policy and program development, as it requires flexibility and responsiveness. This foregrounds the collective agency of cooperatives to develop their own priorities and forms of community.
In our research, others not pulling their weight was the most widespread concern. The overall ageing of the sector’s residents and of housing stock were other concerns, as was the administrative burden created by the regulatory and reporting requirements of the community housing sector. The latter were seen as potentially restricting accessibility and making for rigidity around the types of homes, as well as having implications for who would do the required work of managing and maintaining homes, especially in small cooperatives, where task levels are intensified.
How might housing cooperatives thrive in Australia?
As housing cooperatives are defined by resident involvement, and the quality of this involvement is key to driving positive personal and social outcomes, resident involvement needs to be supported to help cooperatives and residents thrive. We need to find viable ways forward, including ways to expand into appropriate equity models.
First, we need to further build the evidence base and learn from the expertise of the sector. Cooperative residents have an extraordinary amount of knowledge and experience, and a widespread desire to contribute not only to their own cooperatives but to the strength of the cooperative sector more broadly. This reflects the cooperative principle of ‘cooperation among cooperatives’. To effectively channel the sector’s expertise and embody the cooperative principle of democratic decision-making, residents’ voices need to be central in the development of policies and programs.
Second, we need effective management strategies, especially for dealing with dysfunction and conflict. Our research participants told us this should include onboarding and training in maintaining professionalism and conflict resolution, and include requirements for recurrent training over time.
Third, there needs to be flexibility in programs. As part of the regulated community housing sector, most ARHCs are in some form of contractual service agreement with a registered Community Housing Provider (CHP). A small number of cooperatives are themselves registered CHPs. These arrangements mean there are diverse configurations of responsibility, and this diversity should be encouraged and supported so that cooperatives can take on as much or as little responsibility as is appropriate and workable for their membership.
Fourth, there is a bigger question of how cooperativism might be supported in the contemporary landscape. Several of our research participants flagged that while high levels of resident participation may have been possible and desirable when cooperatives were first established in the 1980s and 1990s, challenges today, such as high workloads in paid employment, make voluntary labour harder. Meanwhile, the relentless pressure on social housing waiting lists is leading people to tick all the boxes on their social housing application form, including for cooperatives, out of desperate housing need rather than necessarily wanting to participate in a cooperative.
Fifth, the regulatory and policy system framing ARHCs and the overall cooperative housing sector needs attention. The AHRCs’ unique configuration as member-based organisations means that their residents are both tenant/occupant and collective landlord. More generally, they operate within the relevant cooperative legislation and the regulatory landscape of the community housing sector. The problem here is that these two framings are not always aligned.
As the community housing sector was largely conceived and is regulated as a traditional ‘top-down’ landlord–tenant relationship, this doesn’t readily accommodate the structures and practices of resident agency and empowerment. As one of our survey participants put it, ‘A major challenge [for] co-ops relates to losing our autonomy and independence’, as their housing provider is ‘increasingly [setting] new rules and regulations which impact on the day to day running of our business.’ They felt their co-op could no longer make its own decisions. Regulation always assumes that affected organisations have the scale and capacity to undertake the reporting necessary for compliance. While cooperatives partnered with larger CHPs are, to an extent, shielded from regulatory demands, smaller independent cooperatives may find them too onerous to undertake. Thriving in this landscape means considering how ARHCs can comply with relevant regulations without placing unworkable requirements on volunteer-led organisations.
Lastly, the capacity for the sector to expand beyond affordable rentals needs attention. As highlighted earlier, cooperative sectors in some other countries are significant components of their housing systems and offer equity models in which residents buy and sell their share as they enter and leave the cooperative. The latter can range from limited equity housing cooperatives that involve a low-level equity investment of a few thousand dollars, through to market-rate levels of equity investment, which trade similarly to strata. Ideally, expansion of Australia’s nascent equity housing cooperative sector could sit somewhere between these, as an extension of the extant ARHC sector, or a complement to it.
A key concern in growing the sector relates to how it is perceived. It suffers from being seen as an ‘alternative’ housing choice of hippies and from a degree of unfamiliarity among policymakers, lenders, insurers and others in the housing system. Being perceived as unusual or non-mainstream presents challenges for groups seeking finance for development or for residents wishing to buy an equity share, as financial products and lender expectations might not align with the structure and objectives of the cooperative form.
This issue of non-fit speaks to the need for Australia’s housing system to nurture and enable appropriately skilled and qualified professionals if it is going to diversify into appropriate and affordable housing options.
In the policy arena, how the regulatory landscape surrounding ARHCs might accommodate limited equity cooperatives as part of the sector needs to be examined. Internationally, some limited equity housing cooperatives have found natural partners in community land trusts (CLTs). CLTs can provide access to land, a supportive and mission-aligned infrastructure for training and development, and an asset lock to prevent equity cooperatives from becoming unaffordable or residents voting to demutualise and sell off their stock, both of which have previously occurred. Some CLTs themselves adopt the structure of a cooperative to steward their housing portfolios as they are similarly oriented towards empowering and embedding resident voice.
Why do we need permanently affordable, community-led housing models?
The relative absence of housing cooperatives and CLTs in Australia highlights the absence of community-led housing models that can deliver and steward diverse portfolios of permanently affordable homes, including home ownership.
Australia has a toe in the water with affordable ownership programs through initiatives such as the Help To Buy shared equity program, in which residents and government co-own properties. However, without appropriate restrictions on resales, homes in such models can lose affordability over time. Moreover, without resale restrictions that tie affordability to properties on an ongoing basis, such demand-side programs may inflate the market rather than address supply by creating a pool of permanently affordable homes. International experience among CLTs and limited equity cooperatives shows that it is possible to both retain affordability and enable resident mobility and equity, and Australia is well primed to learn from that experience. Recent research with would-be buyers into resale-restricted models based on CLT principles shows overwhelming interest and nuanced buyer motivations. This foregrounds the importance of ‘home’ to many, rather than speculative advantage.
In addition to their track records in delivering and maintaining affordability, cooperatives and CLTs provide desperately needed options in which residents and the community at large can have an ongoing say in the design, development and governance of housing and other amenities and spaces. Currently in Australia, community and resident voices are largely absent in the private rental system and, in dominant forms of private ownership, increasingly limited to questions of individualised capital gain. The current state of strata titling as a private ownership structure starkly illustrates the tensions between collective and individualised responsibilities, rights and powers. Many of these issues echo the issues experienced in cooperatives, which many cooperatives have been able to manage. Our research with ARHCs offers insights into how strata might learn from the cooperative sector.
Importantly, international examples show immense diversity in terms of the forms, levels and expectations of resident involvement, such that an inability to participate in a particular way does not render the situation untenable for the resident or the organisation. Scale makes a difference to how participation works. In CLTs, particularly, participation and collaboration often extend beyond the boundaries of the organisation into local planning and development and build on larger community networks. For example, local CLT memberships include people who do not live in the CLT’s homes but believe in its mission and want to have a say in the planning and development of their neighbourhood, suburb or city. This has been fundamental to the model’s success and in achieving broader urban planning and governance outcomes in which the community has had input about appropriate, place-based approaches to development, including innovative and high-quality approaches to infill.
In the United Kingdom, this has generated preferential treatment of CLTs in rezonings of sensitive sites, recognising that CLTs will deliver better quality, more appropriate, and permanently affordable homes on sites that would otherwise be subject to immense community opposition. Our team at Western Sydney University is currently working with local, national and international CLT actors to develop a framework for appropriate policy in Australia, drawing on decades of international trial and error.
In all of this, we cannot ignore the fact that all housing in Australia sits on unceded Aboriginal lands. Many Aboriginal service providers have adopted a cooperative structure as this aligns with their priorities around community decision-making and self-determination. Many of these cooperatives include housing within their service.
Our previous work with Aboriginal organisations registered interest in CLTs as the CLT form resonates with aspirations for collective land tenure and community voice, and both collective and individual empowerment. That work documents the key policy requirements for enabling CLTs on Aboriginal lands in line with community expertise and interwoven aspirations regarding the return and healing of lands, appropriate and dignified housing options, and community enterprise. Internationally, First Peoples’ CLTs are emerging to embody similarly interwoven community aspirations for returning and healing ancestral lands, creating quality and affordable housing and enabling community workforce development through their activities. The Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Wiyot Tribe in the US provide examples of how First Peoples see CLT potential:
We envision a Bay Area in which Ohlone language and ceremony are an active, thriving part of the cultural landscape, where Ohlone place names and history is known and recognized and where intertribal Indigenous communities have affordable housing, social services, cultural centers and land to live, work and pray on.
As a tribal community land trust, land is at the center of everything we do. By using the CLT model, we maintain Wiyot ownership in perpetuity, remove land from the speculative market, and direct its use in ways that build community and individual wealth.
Ways forward
Based on Australia’s history of housing cooperatives, the persistence of the sector and its outcomes to date, and international evidence regarding both cooperatives and CLTs, there is much we can do to enable community-led models of housing that provide options for high-quality, affordable homes and community input in meaningful ways. Permanently affordable home ownership options are particularly absent, and these models are ideally positioned to address this problem.
The potential of cooperatives and CLTs does not end here, however, as their overarching strengths lie in channelling community voice into ongoing dialogue about the nature and scope of appropriate, place-based development. CLTs in particular are known for stewarding broad portfolios of residential and non-residential property, speaking to not only local housing needs but also appropriate employment, care, health services, retail, land regeneration and other programs.
Identifying where housing cooperatives and CLTs might grow highlights the pinch points in our present housing system. They highlight the extent to which, over the past few decades, this system has been configured to understand, build, promote and transact homes as individualised and financialised assets. Thankfully, there is also growing interest in and capacity for diversifying the housing system to include more appropriate, place-based options, driven by an ethics of collaborative stewardship, perpetuity and equity on unceded Aboriginal lands.