Initial Conclusions from My Danish Housing Studies

Homey additions by residents at Tinggaarden nonprofit cohousing community

I just returned from four months of living in Copenhagen, Denmark on a Valle Scholarship, a travel fellowship part of my masters of landscape architecture that gave me the opportunity to study a topic of my interest in a Scandinavian or Baltic country. I chose to study community-owned housing in Denmark.

In brief, I studied community-owned housing in Denmark to understand design and the design process that can help support affordable home ownership models. Here's an excerpt from my statement of purpose:

Amidst our current affordable housing crisis in Seattle, people are looking for ways to help our most vulnerable populations to stay in place to keep our communities intact, equip ourselves for climate resiliency, live more sustainable lives and have access to economic opportunity. Among a other solutions, cooperative housing has risen as a way for communities to achieve affordable homeownership. This strategy inherently supports long-term investment in place, community cohesion and a way to equalize the distribution of wealth. With a renewed interest in this model, building is already beginning in the Seattle area. As a landscape architecture student who wants to support community ownership and affordability, I would like to understand how to best design for these unique circumstances. Studying the cooperative housing in Denmark will give me insights that I will be able to apply to design effective cooperative housing as a landscape architect.

I chose Denmark for its strong presence of housing cooperatives and cohousing. In 2016, nonprofit housing cooperatives made up 17% of total Danish housing stock while private cooperatives made up 6.5%. While I was first most interested in the nonprofit sector, once I got to Denmark, I realized I was interested in learning about all the different models of collective ownership.

During my time in Denmark I conducted three in-depth case studies with multiple interviews, background research, and participant observation, in two cases, living there. My three case studies were a private cooperative called Andelsboligforening Nørrebrogade 100-104, a nonprofit cohousing estate called Boligselskabet Tinggården Herfølge and the Mælkebøtten neighborhood of Christiania, a collectively-owned experimental community in the center of Copenhagen. As can be seen in my previous blog posts, I also learned a lot about the context of the various neighborhoods, other instances of these housing models, and the political and economic context of Denmark (and Sweden). 

Nørrebro Private Co-op Courtyard

Tinggården nonprofit cohousing

 Central Courtyard of Mælkebøtten in Christiania

I developed an ambitious set of research questions:

1. In what forms of community ownership, resident democracy and self-management do residents feel ownership over common spaces?
2. How does community ownership affect the original and ongoing design process and creation of physical space?
3. What aspects of these processes are important for creating a sense of community and collective ownership of the common spaces?
4. Is a sense of community ownership over common spaces unique and valuable for creating a sense of belonging, community, solidarity?
5. How does community ownership contribute to residents' quality of life/life satisfaction?
6. Do social patterns and group dynamics in these communities reveal guiding design principles that could be helpful for designing new community-controlled housing?
7. What strategies might be applicable to the Seattle area and US urban and cultural context?

Since I haven't completed my academically rigorous analysis yet, I don't have answers to my research questions yet but I do have a better understanding of community-owned housing in Denmark and in general that helps validate the purpose of my work.

My first take-away is despite previously being a socialist and very open-minded country, Denmark now has a right-wing government and is in a process of liberalizing (marketizing) the economic and political systems. All three of the community-owned housing models I studied have been challenged by national policy in the last eighteen years. 

Private cooperatives were deregulated when the liberal-conservative governance that came into power in Denmark in 2001 and lifted the “mortgage ban." This meant that cooperative members could take out a mortgage to buy their cooperative share which incentivized raising the share price in co-ops, essentially changing what was once a communal and spatially-fixed financial asset to a liquid and individual asset. (Bruun 2018, 146) Interest-only loans for cooperatives, introduced in 2003, enabled co-ops to keep monthly payments low rather than realistically budgeting for major repairs. (Bruun 2018, 146) Thus, neoliberal housing reforms and deregulation of the mortgage finance market sapped wealth of cooperatives while raising prices.

The nonprofit housing sector, in which collectively owned by resident associations with a democratic structure, was given the "right-to-sell" starting in 2004, which directly counteracts the intention of nonprofit housing to be outside of the market. (Vidal 2018, 56) Reduction of subsidies have pushed the sector to be more commercial in their approach to working with residents which affects the perception of the sector and the national government has a large influence over the sector's solidarity fund, the National Building Fund, which affects it's financial viability. (Vidal 2018, 58-61) While I was in Denmark this fall, the Parallel Societies Package was approved, which allows for state intervention in nonprofit housing areas that they deem "ghettos" on racist criteria that include neo-apartheid stricter laws and social control as well as demolition of housing. This is not only an attack on the residents, and housing associations, but the nonprofit housing sector as a whole, painting a very bad reputation for it synonymous with "ghetto."

Below is a video I took of a demonstration in front of the national nonprofit housing organization BL symbolically protecting the National Building Fund that was proposed to be used by state to demolish nonprofit housing.

Christiania, which had reached a fairly stable relationship with the Danish state is now on a more unstable economic footing after being practically forced to buy their property in 2010.

As I was learning about the demise of community-owned housing in Denmark, I could see that the viability of these models is dependent on their support by state policy and people's perception, which play off of each other in the political arena. These models all functioned well while they enjoyed political, financial, participatory and cultural support.

Getting back to design, I could see that when a housing model is influential enough it becomes imprinted in the built environment. This happens over time by individuals adapting their homes and then by construction which requires more resources and planning. In places that have been built for a specific housing model, the people living there test the design, and if the design is successful, they test the ideology behind it. The built environment its self can have a huge influence on the effectiveness of its intended social organization and ideology. If the design is popular the ideology is more likely to succeed and vice versa. 

The purpose-built design of Tinggaarden has proven to support community life and a sense of ownership in nonprofit housing

The purpose-built design of nonprofit housing area Urbanplanen has not succeeded in inspiring the same level of community a sense of ownership that Tinggaarden has.

It has been interesting to analyze my interviews and the physical environments of different housing areas to understand what design can do to support community life and a sense of ownership that in turn contribute to the perception and viability of community-owned housing.