Introduction

Purpose

The goal of this model is to provide participants with the shelter typically associated with housing ownership in ways that cultivate stewardship of land for the broader community and future generations. The three streams in this model reflect the need to build the futures we wish to see within the constraints of the systems we’ve inherited.

The first stream provides a way to pool the capital needed to acquire land as a collective and the second stream allows participants to accrue equity in ways that provides the individual security of shelter associated with house ownership. As detailed below, the third stream provides a process for this equity to be slowly transitioned from individuals to the entity that owns the land and houses for the collective.

As equity is transferred to the collective, equitable access to secure and affordable shelter can increasingly be provided for all participants regardless of equity accrued. As part of this Collective Stewardship stream governance of land should be returned to First Nations peoples (whose ongoing care for Country is our best chance for ensuring that future generations can continue to coexist with these lands).

While aspects of all three streams can potentially be run in parallel (as detailed below), the goal is to shift the provision of shelter away from individualistic approaches and towards more communal ones.

Intended application

This model is designed to be used by a housing collective which owns multiple properties (not necessarily co-located), although it could also function for multi-house collectives on an adjoining, or single title, property. In this model, major financial actions impact everyone in the collective, and those implementing it will need to commit to participating in collective decision-making practices.

This model will be tied to a legal implementation within a specific legal and financial jurisdiction, and so it is recommended that a collective’s activities reside entirely within that. Some research would be needed to adapt the model to other jurisdictions.

The Housing Collective

The term “housing collective” is intended to be a general term for a collection of people committed to making decisions together about housing; it does not indicate the specific legal structure used. There are multiple legal structures that could work with this model (and the collective may not have gotten as far as organising that structure when choosing to implement this model).

The financial and legal aspects of this model work best if the collective can build a solid practice of making high trust decisions together. While the model will provide legal and financial specifics that might be needed in key breakdowns of group processes (such as an exit strategy), it’s in everyone’s best interest if the collective is built on strong relationships, processes, and trust to minimise the need to resort to legalities. As such, the formation of a housing collective requires much more work than simply applying this model, and the collective would want to develop and document its governance processes.

Each collective therefore needs to be of a size that can make effective governance decisions on important subjects, such as security and risk of shelter and finances. These types of decisions tend to work better with as much active consent of all involved as possible. For instance, the model could be used with enough properties to provide housing for somewhere in the vicinity of 5 - 50 people, and no larger.

Rather than attempting to start larger collectives, it is recommended that multiple small collectives could independently use this model. An additional option for a collective that is getting larger than ~30 people is to choose to intentionally divide into two or more smaller collectives, each of which can then build on their experience and support new people interested in participating in collective housing projects.

Model as Guidance vs. Application by a Collective

It is important to differentiate the minimal-scope guidance of the model from the broader range of agreements required by a Collective about their governance practices. For instance, the model provides guidance on how to collectively govern the provision of shelter in the context of the current constraints of ownership practices required to acquire land. Each collective will need to have a governance process for making decisions about the ways in which that land is used, with careful consideration given to what decisions are made at the multi-property level, at the multi-house level on a given property, at a house-level, as groups of participants, and/or about the personal spaces used by individuals. Some of these decisions will be specific to some streams within the model and aspects of the decision-making processes will differ for different collectives. We’ll return to these variables after offering an overview of the model itself.