Parliament opens the door to a new law on housing cooperatives

BarcelonaFive parliamentary groups, with an absolute majority, supported the creation of a new law regulating cooperative housing for use, a non-profit housing model based on self-managed communities. The bill presented this Wednesday in Parliament seeks to improve the legal framework within which these entities operate, which currently provide 1,175 homes spread across 66 buildings in Catalonia.

The main feature of cooperative housing for use is that it is non-profit and entails collective and permanent ownership of all the cooperative's homes. Thus, the cooperative grants the use of the homes to the members (according to clear and equitable criteria) but retains ownership. Therefore, the members of a cooperative of this type cannot sell the homes they live in, but neither can the entity itself do so, either to the members themselves or to third parties. Likewise, the law should limit inheritance of the use of apartments to specific cases that demonstrate that an heir has lived in the home for a long period of time and is also a member of the cooperative.

In fact, once established, a cooperative with a transfer of use cannot be converted into another type of company (for example, it cannot become a for-profit company), but it will have the same advantages as other types of non-profit associations.

The other differentiating element of this type of housing is that, in addition to being cooperatives for managing properties, they must also operate as consumer cooperatives to pool the contracting of services among members, such as electricity, water, telecommunications services, or even food purchases. With the new law, cooperatives will have to have greater facilities for collectively contracting these services, something that does not currently occur, since, for example, some electricity companies refuse to install a single meter in properties managed under this model.

The proposed law, prepared and promoted by the Federation of Housing Cooperatives of Catalonia (Habicoop) and the Cooperative Housing Sector of the Solidarity Economy Network of Catalonia (XES), does not foresee that administrations will have to provide, in principle, new subsidies to cooperatives in concession. However, some Catalan city councils already support this type of housing.

Few changes to the text

Initially, the proposal was supported by ERC, Comuns, and the CUP (Coup d'Or), and later by the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party). At the last minute, Junts also announced its support for the bill, which, once approved by the full Parliament, will be passed on to the Parliamentary Committee on Territory and Housing, where the groups will be able to submit amendments. With the exception of Junts, which was not present at the press conference, the other four parties pledged to adhere to the submitted text as closely as possible.

Until now, cooperatives operating in this way have been governed by the Catalan cooperative law, but the proposal by Habicoop and XES would allow for the creation, within the same law, of a special legal framework for this type of non-profit entity.