Cooperative housing is making a comeback

Lindsay Harris, an anthropologist who teaches at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kamloops, has become an accidental property developer. In 2020, with the pandemic raging, she and some neighbours decided to take a run at the city’s affordability crisis by trying something audacious: creating a housing co-op, from scratch. The group gave itself a name – the Propolis Housing Cooperative – and took stock of what each member could bring to the table. 

“A number of us were working in food-security and food-systems advocacy and seeing the interconnection between food insecurity and the housing crisis,” she recounts. “We [took] those skills that we had in grassroots community organizing and said, ‘Let’s become housing developers.’” None of them, Harris admits, had a clue how to do it. 

Five years later, Propolis has secured a piece of land, raised $1.1 million through a community bond and attracted private backers. They’re currently applying for a low-interest loan from Canada’s $1.5-billion fund to increase co-op housing nationwide, launched in 2022. 

The group will also apply for a municipal building permit this summer, allowing them to construct a six-storey apartment building with 53 units, some community and retail space at street level, a rooftop garden and a car share program. “We’re working really hard for there to be a consistent level of affordability across all of the units,” says Harris, who is Propolis’s executive director, “understanding that the real benefit of cooperative housing is that it becomes permanently affordable.”

At a time when even basic housing has become unattainable for many in advanced economies, the housing co-op movement – which was born in England in 1844 and reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s before a multi-decade decline – is making a comeback, at least in Canada. In February 2025, an Abacus poll of 6,000 Canadians found that three in five respondents “believe there isn’t enough non-profit and co-op housing in their communities, and 61% say increasing availability should be a top priority.” 

“This is a high moment,” says Tom Clement, the executive director of the Co-operative Housing Federation of Toronto (CHFT). “I’m very optimistic.” Julie LaPalme, secretary-general of Ottawa-based Cooperative Housing International, agrees. “Affordability is affecting all ages, [but] it’s different with younger generations in that they’re pretty much priced out of the purchasing market,” she says. “The resurgence [of cooperative housing] is driven by necessity.”

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The confidence barometer, however, varies by geography. About half of the 1.2 million co-op apartments in the United States are located in New York City. These are infamous for their exclusivity and low rents, but there’s not much growth elsewhere. Likewise in the United Kingdom, the co-op housing sector is “stagnant,” says Rebecca Harvey, executive editor at Co-operative News, a Manchester, U.K.–based trade publication. But, she adds, the movement has made rapid gains in Europe and Australia and will get a plug at the United Nations’ Second World Summit for Social Development, in Doha in November. “There’s going to be a big co-op delegation heading there to present the cooperative case for a lot of the issues that exacerbate housing issues around the world.” (A March 2025 report by Housing Europe estimates that there are about 7.9 million co-op dwellings in the European Union as well as non-EU countries like Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.)

Cooperative housing, Harvey explains, isn’t just about affordability. The sector is defined by seven guiding principles, which delineate the democratic ways in which cooperative housing societies are managed. Residents own them jointly, on a not-for-profit basis. They are expected to take part in the work of running their dwellings but also to participate in the communal life of communities where tenants will share everything from amenity spaces to bikes and tools. 

Some sectors of the movement are seeing especially robust growth, such as student housing co-ops, land trusts and intergenerational projects. “Loneliness of elderly or older people is being mitigated by having a mixed-use cooperative housing where older people and younger people are in the same space,” Harvey says. “Actually, that works really, really well.”

The real benefit of cooperative housing is that it becomes permanently affordable.

— Lindsay Harris, executive director, Propolis Housing Cooperative

LaPalme points to Zurich, where the municipality adds co-ops on a yearly basis, with a goal of reaching a third of all housing in the city. One of the most notable is Mehr als Wohnen, which means “more than living.” Built on a former industrial site owned by the city and leased to the cooperative for a century, Mehr als Wohnen is a cluster of 13 six- to seven-storey blocks constructed between 2008 and 2015, with more than 370 apartments for some 1,300 residents, as well as amenities such as daycares, cafés and co-working spaces. It offers leases 20% below average market rates in Zurich. The project attracted serious architectural talent and was backed by 35 Swiss co-ops, which collectively contributed the professional and financial heft to bring such a large venture to fruition. 

Despite the long decline of public support for co-op housing in Canadian cities, the Toronto federation, Clement says, continued to create or refurbish some co-ops over the past 25 years – a total of 548 units in six projects between 2000 and 2022, compared to 2,500 to 3,000 in the 1980s and 1990s. 

Yet the recent public policy pivot has resulted in some landmark new ventures. Case in point: a newly approved three-tower joint venture between CHFT, Civic Developments and Windmill Developments to construct 612 co-op apartments and 306 condos in three towers on a city-owned property next to a major transit hub. It’s the largest co-op to be built in Canada in three decades. 

There will likely be more at this scale, given the new federal funding and municipal contributions of land. Vancouver City Council, for example, voted last fall to fast-track social and cooperative housing projects. Not all communities, however, have welcomed these ventures. In March, the eastern Ontario city of Kingston blocked a $127-million/248-unit co-op proposal.

In Kamloops, Propolis is now vetting architects and contractors and grappling with the task of translating lofty design principles – resilience and energy efficiency, for instance – into bricks and mortar. 

“It requires so many people pulling together to make it happen,” Harris says, echoing the essence of the co-op philosophy. 

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture.