The Edinburgh Student Housing Cooperative Campaign
Rent in Edinburgh is bloody expensive. Throw into that letting agencies charging illegal fees, landlords running off with your deposit, far-from-sufficient student finance — it can often be hard to feed yourself. Let alone house yourself. Let alone live!
In Edinburgh we are also facing a significant shortage in student housing, which the University chronically fails to address. Across Britain tenants are exploring a number of methods to deal with dodgy landlords, rocketing rents, unfair contracts, and cuts to housing benefits. Amongst them are tenant’s unions, which aim to share information on shoddy letting agencies and landlords and to facilitate collective resistance.
Another solution being explored, notably by students in London, Birmingham and Edinburgh, is student housing co-operatives.
**A housing co-operative is a property collectively owned and run by its residents. Successful co-operatives are built on the foundations of democracy, equality, and solidarity — fostering innovation and community. Residents become their own landlords and knock a significant chunk off the rent in the process.**
Is this possible? With a captive market, student housing co-ops are practically guaranteed residents, making them a highly viable business venture. Once we form a business plan seeking funding is relatively straight forwards. But is it possible to have students successful running such a venture?
But won’t students cock it all up?
The US has a vibrant history of student housing co-operatives. The Berkeley Student Cooperative houses over 1,300 students in 17 houses where rates are almost half that of neighbouring university-owned halls. At Michigan State University, over 4,000 students live in small scale co-operatives. Such a venture is evidently possible - and could easily based on the best practice developed by the 70 years of experience in the US.
Beyond cheap housing co-operatives provide something that most halls lack: community. The co-op depends on collective responsibility, delegation, and mutual aid. Formally, this usually means members contribute a small number of hours a week to house-keeping, cooking, and management. Everyone quickly gets to know each other - providing strong social ties. Such communities become hotbeds for the spontaneous, non-hierarchical organising of informal support structures (such as study groups), activities (sports, gardening etc.) and experiment.
Interestingly the University’s oldest student halls at Milne’s Court, on the Royal Mile, was itself originally founded as a cooperative in 1894 as part of a broader scheme by the Edinburgh Social Union to improve Edinburgh’s slums by empowering residents. The scheme proved to be a curious and often contradictory mix of radical social utopianism with philanthropic capitalism.
Housing co-operatives do not solve the underlying economic issues entrenching class division and driving inequality. However they do provide a glimpse into potential methods of organising a fairer, more participatory and sustainable economic system than contemporary capitalism.
