Housing

The kind of housing we want

Our  proposal aims to recover the collective and community housing, be it in urban or rural areas, as a transition on the way of population relocation in the territory. We need to go beyond private property, recovering communal housing by collectivization, in order to cover our actual housing needs. Therefore, we are developing a model that guarantees the right of use, over speculation and commodification of housing.

The Housing Office

A neighborhood locale, an association locale, a community center, an office of social rights or even a street car can be spaces for sharing solutions on housing.

To effectively address this issue, we analyze it in all its complexity: recognizing the diversity of situations and individual desires and  predisposition of access to housing in one way or another. Thus, the housing office, needs to have a wide range of tools:

  • Occupation: make use of abandoned or disused properties. More and more occupations occur when courts evict and affected people decided to occupy the  dwelling to prevent the forced dispossession supervised by the state. It is, therefore, a direct appropriation practice without intermediaries, and increased social support.
  • Cession contract: agreement between the person leasing and tenant to enjoy the use of a property in exchange for its maintenance, no rental costs.
  • Tenant farming: real estate cession agreement (rural or urban) in exchange for the maintenance, rehabilitation or land products.
  • Autoconstruction, namely, bioconstruction: construction of housing particularly by reducing the impact on the environment and using local raw materials, completely from recycled materials.
  • Self-sufficient caravans (mobile real estate): alternative housing, allowing to combine a nomadic life with sedentism and one that intensify self-sufficiency.
  • Repopulation: recovery of life in the countryside with the occupation of towns and  abandoned land or other means of legal access to abandoned buildings.

CIC Social Housing Cooperative 

The social housing cooperative rent mortgaged flats to secure social housing to debtors who can no longer pay their mortgage.

The landlord unable to pay the mortgage, rent the flat for 5 years to the cooperative and becomes an associate. The commission will take the responsability to assign another rental housing from its own rental housing stock. Rents have a social price (estimated to generally not to exceed 4 euros/m2).

The cooperative also can give support to those affected by the mortgage, through its legal services, delaying the time of repossession of the flat by the bank or to try to prevent the seizure of the guarantors of  these mortgages.

In  the long term, the cooperative will generate housing stock to provide its partners under a cession of use. Buying unpaid collective mortgage packages can be one of the mechanisms to achieve the generation of collective property at a social price.

www.habitatgesocial.cat