A financing of 31 million to build 350 social homes in Catalonia of projects located in Manresa, Granollers, Vilafranca, Barcelona and Lleida. This operation, which has just been announced by the Development Bank of the Council of Europe (CEB), and that will benefit the Catalan Sostre Cívicrepresents a record in the amount granted to a cooperative by a public bank.
Beyond the value of this figure, the initiative represents “an endorsement of the cooperative model in transfer of use”. This is what the spokesperson for Sostre Civic, Jose Tellez. The action will allow the entity to double the housing stock. Currently, Sostre Cívic has 250 floors in transfer of use in which families already live and has 150 more in the promotion phase. The aid will favor the promotion of 350 more, which “will help our consolidation over a period of two or three years,” details Téllez. The project addresses one of the historical difficulties of the cooperative housing sector in launching construction: the availability of financing.
In addition to financing, one of the handicaps in this area is the transfer of land use by the administrations. Téllez recognizes that “Traditional financial entities do not support these proposals and we are only left with ethical banking, which has limited resources.“. Although there are public alternatives such as the Institut Català de Finances (ICF) and the Official Credit Institute (ICO), “we had the need to leave our borders and go to Europe, specifically to the CEB, to expand our investment portfolio.”
Sostre Cívic alludes to the benefits of the Danish model, in which in a city like Copenhagen, a 60% of the homes comes from soil public origin. In the Danish capital, the law favors a group of tenants buying an entire block and transforming it into a cooperative
Jose Téllez advocates replicating this strategy in Catalonia, in which the political will in the Nordic capital facilitates a 30% of the total housing stock, whether cooperative regime in transfer of use. This formula, emerging in the Catalan market, consists of the contribution of an initial capital and the payment of a monthly fee for the use of the home indefinitely. If you leave the apartment, the initial capital is returned.
More than a thousand homes
The steps forward thanks to public support, such as that of the Development Bank of the Council of Europe (CEB), have led to sustained growth in the cooperative housing stock under transfer of use in Catalonia. Since 2021, when 500 constructions were registered, the increase has been 140%exceeding the current 1,200 apartments. These data, shared by the Llargavista cooperative housing observatoryconfirm this upward trend.
Téllez predicts that, applying a economy of scale to these initiatives, “our model will be able to compete face to face with the traditional modalities of buying and selling and renting.” In fact, it specifies that the impulse of these formulas results in the obligation to lower prices for the largest offer, despite the fact that in the case of the transfer of use, this is still very small.
Although the global stock is below 1%, this tool, he adds, “helps guarantee the right to housing.” In this sense, he points out that “the citizen views this model favorably, since it is based on shared services, community life and the purchase value is at a cost price.”
Cooperatives like Sostre Cívic insist on deepening and strengthening the tools and mechanisms that accelerate public support for the transfer of land and aid to facilitate the purchase of real estate by cooperatives, which today are the main limitations because the model is extended. During the presentation of the project, the president of Sostre Cívic, Carlos Alcobaexplained that the works will begin at the beginning of 2025 and it is expected that the members of the cooperative will be able to move in during 2026.
The sector admits that the cooperative model will not solve the residential problem in Catalonia, but it does see itself capable of helping public administrations to increase the stock of subsidized housing. According to current construction plans, it is expected that in the future there will be more than a thousand homes and residents in cooperative housing in 67 projectsabout twenty of whom in the city of Barcelona and more than half metropolitan area.
Change in public policies
The housing cooperatives explain that the model has arrived late in Catalonia because the public policies have focused on the individual property of homes, leaving the door open to phenomena such as speculation. Unlike other forms that have historically existed in Catalonia – such as property housing cooperatives, where once the construction is done the property is divided horizontally and distributed among the members of the cooperative -, the transfer of use model is based on the idea of collective property, which breaks with the rigid dichotomy between private property and the public.
Cooperatives under the transfer of use regime start from collective ownership. Therefore, the property is always maintained collectively and the users will have a transfer of use and will never be able to dispose of the home to sell it or transfer it to their children. This cooperative housing formula is one of the most established in Catalonia, where it is normally presented under the umbrella of the transfer of land use, so that You do not have ownership of the apartment nor do you have to pay rent to a landlord.
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