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Architects Against Housing Alienation!

TO END HOUSING ALIENATION IN c\a\n\a\d\a
WE DEMAND...

¹Land Back!

²On the Land Housing

³First Nations Home Building Lodges

Reparative Architecture

A Gentrification Tax

Surplus Properties for Housing

Intentional Communities for Unhoused People!

Collective Ownership!

Mutual Aid Housing!

¹⁰Ambient Ecosystems Commons!

Join The Campaign

We Demand Collective Ownership

The legal, cultural, and financial systems for housing in c\a\n\a\d\a have been biased to privately house the nuclear family. As a result, it is near impossible to obtain funding for collectively owned housing. We demand that all levels of government incorporate policies that encourage co-living - cohousing and cooperatives over speculative real estate development and that credit unions and banks remove roadblocks and create pathways to collective financing models.

Vancouver

Haeccity Studio Architecture

Canadian Cohousing Network

A community of diverse residents gathers for a collective meal amid buildings with connecting paths, shared gardens, play areas and amenity spaces.

Collective action and collective ownership is marginalized and rarely utilized in c\a\n\a\d\a’s private, profit driven housing system. And even when they are deployed, they are often done so in isolation, unrealizing the synergistic benefits that they can provide in unison. The result is the unrivalled dominance of speculative housing that is at once unaffordable and socially isolating. Co-operative housing, cohousing, and co-living are all, in varying ways, vital in the fight against housing alienation.

The barriers to realizing the full potential collective ownership are systemic on multiple fronts. While cohousing and co-living models are experiencing a resurgence, they have been co-opted by the market and repackaged as for-profit friendly. This process has swept the radical, mutual aid roots aside and flattened their potential. Indeed, most cohousing utilizes a condominium or strata model. At the same time, financial institutions are reluctant to fund co-ops, cohousing, and co-living projects, presenting a major hurdle for more widespread deployment.

To overcome this systemic bias against collectivity, we demand that both government and financial institutions adopt policies to support a bold new vision of collective ownership that leverages the best attributes of various collective housing approaches – what we call Co-Co-Mo. Co-Co-Mo combines the cooperative tenure model with the cohousing delivery model of participatory design and development with the socio-spatial arrangements co-living. To achieve this requires a regulatory approach for policy changes at all levels of government and an end to the roadblocks within the financial sector.

To demonstrate the potential of Co-C-Mo, we have developed a case study project in the specific cultural context of the City of Richmond within Metro Vancouver. Diversity is concentrated in Metro Vancouver’s suburbs. The “ethnoburb” of Richmond is 80% visible minority and 60% immigrants and its concentration of Chinese and East Asian people has fostered cultural preservation, including a thriving shadow economy of goods and services rendered from private homes and disseminated through personal networks and cash payments. This vibrancy persists despite the prevalence of single-family houses on large lots. However, this low-density, car-oriented urbanism isolates people from their neighbours and younger generations from their elders and contributes to cultural loss over generations. It also has dogged inflexibility in the face of a housing and climate change.

The site for our case study is a leftover from Richmond’s agrarian past, a large lot with double street frontage in a largely developed area. Richmond’s unique history and cultural mosaic includes a large number of working- and middle-class families, resulting in a rich opportunity for diverse intentional communities. To develop critical design criteria, we held an expert-led workshop that incorporated layered “personas” based on demographic data, interviews, and direct observation. Through this process we developed a housing scheme that accommodates diverse residents and their varied needs and desires. The result is a micro-campus of medium density forms that respond to varying familial conditions and ages, from senior’s cohousing to families with children, interwoven with collective eating, working, and socializing spaces.

TAKE ACTION:

  • and share the Manual of Co
  • , join, or donate to the Canadian Cohousing Network 
  • or rent in an existing Cohousing project
  • a Housing Co-op in BC
  • a collaborative meal with a group of people and chat about what living more collaboratively could look like and share photos of it with #collectiveownership


TEAM MEMBERS


Kathy McGrenera
Katherine Co
Lukas Ewing
Travis Hanks
Alena Pavan
Jorge Román
Shirley Shen

Not for Sale!

We are Architects Against Housing Alienation and we believe the current housing system in c\a\n\a\d\a must be abolished!

DEMANDS
MANIFESTO
COLLECTIVE
EXHIBITION

2023, Architects Against Housing Alienation