Frequently Asked Questions
This website deals mainly with housing coops. To read about what Boston-area worker coops are doing, check out worcn.org.
Housing coops can have different levels of group participation.
Many houses share chores and have regular consensus-based meetings to make decisions together. Many coops maintain very affordable rent and dues for their members. Some houses throw lots of events, some houses work on projects or offer community services together, and some houses have missions, legal organization and sliding scale rent policies or large-scale money-pooling.
If you're in Boston, you're in luck because there are over 50 housing coops in the area.
If you're not interested in starting your own coop and want to join an existing coop, here's some pointers:
- Join the Boston Coop Network mailing list, and the Boston Coop Assembly mailing list, where house openings and events are advertised.
- Search on Craigslist (no, seriously!). Doing a search for "coop" in the all housing section, or searching for the key words "we cook" in the same place yields regular results! You can even get automatic email alerts whenever a new craigslist listing is posted.
- Go to events. Visit the meetup group and read up on the monthly assemblies, both great places to meet coops and hear about openings.
- Hang in there, and consider starting your own house. See the resources page if you're considering starting your own coop.
Coop is short for cooperative. A cooperative is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations," according to the International Cooperative Alliance (http://ica.coop)
Housing cooperative
A housing cooperative, co-op, or housing company (especially in Finland[1]), is a legal entity, usually a cooperative or a corporation, which owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings; it is one type of housing tenure. Housing cooperatives are a distinctive form of home ownership that have many characteristics that differ from other residential arrangements such as single family home ownership, condominiums and renting.[2]
The corporation is membership-based, with membership granted by way of a share purchase in the cooperative. Each shareholder in the legal entity is granted the right to occupy one housing unit. A primary advantage of the housing cooperative is the pooling of the members' resources so that their buying power is leveraged, thus lowering the cost per member in all the services and products associated with home ownership.
Another key element in some forms of housing cooperatives (but not Finnish housing companies, for example) is that the members, through their elected representatives, screen and select who may live in the cooperative, unlike any other form of home ownership.
Housing cooperatives fall into two general tenure categories: non-ownership (referred to as non-equity or continuing) and ownership (referred to as equity or strata). In non-equity cooperatives, occupancy rights are sometimes granted subject to an occupancy agreement, which is similar to a lease. In equity cooperatives, occupancy rights are sometimes granted by way of the purchase agreements and legal instruments registered on the title. The corporation's articles of incorporation and bylaws as well as occupancy agreement specifies the cooperative's rules.
The word cooperative is also used to describe a non-share capital co-op model in which fee-paying members obtain the right to occupy a bedroom and share the communal resources of a house that is owned by a cooperative organization. Such is the case with student cooperatives in some college and university communities across the United State