A: A cooperative is essentially a group of people working together for a common purpose. There are several types of coops: member-owned cooperatives, worker-owned cooperatives, and housing cooperatives. The former two are democratically-run businesses where all profits belong to the members or employees. Because of their organizational structure, they tend to be well-suited towards balancing financial profitability with living the values of their members. A housing cooperative, which is the type that we are creating, might be defined as a community of people living together. Often a housing coop will have a mission of some sort beyond simply providing housing (see our mission statement, for instance) and/or a set of commonly-held values that members strive to live by. Often the house is owned by a nonprofit corporation that is accountable to the people living in the house, as will be the case with our coop. This means that, within budgetary and legal constraints, the members of the coop are free to do as they like with their property--they are their "own landlords," in effect. This also gives the coop some stability and helps to ensure that the house remains an affordable place to live even if real estate prices rise in the area.
A: Our coop will be open to students. However, we feel that there is particularly a shortage of housing coops that are not primarily student-focused, considering the waiting lists and general dearth of vacancies at these houses. Thus, our house will be similar to Sasona, Whitehall, and Sunflower in that it will not be a "student coop."
A: We are working with Community Housing Expansion of Austin (Sasona's nonprofit). CHEA is currently comprised of only one house (Sasona), but from the start it had the goal of eventually expanding and including multiple co-ops. The new co-op will thus be CHEA's second house.
GAIA Host Collective