by MOBA Housing SCE
MOBA brings together resident-led co-operative housing initiatives from five countries (Czechia, Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia) under an umbrella organization that was incorporated as a European Cooperative Society (SCE) in 2020. Today, we seek the support of our peers and allies to provide affordable housing finance to pioneering housing co-operatives in our countries.
When a group of housing professionals and activists, architects, sociologists, social mobilizers, researchers and financial experts from Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia first met in Berlin during the European Collaborative Housing Day 2017 in Berlin, we were excited to get to know each other. Most of us had been involved in local housing struggles and in social and solidarity economy enterprises for years; we had grown up in the post-socialist transition period and started our professional life around the 2008 financial crisis.
Quickly it became evident that the difficulties we were facing locally were of a similar nature: an almost exclusively private housing market, with little or no social housing, regulation and rapidly increasing real estate prices pushing a significant part of the population out of the housing market. Additionally, in the “European periphery”, financing streams for affordable housing are rare, both at national and EU levels.
What came more of a surprise was when we realized that we had all come up with not-for-profit, co-operative, membership-based and affordable rental housing models. Inspired by the co-operative housing movements in other parts of the world, we are convinced that in the context of the growing housing crisis, bottom-up and self-managed initiatives play a crucial role in mitigating the dysfunctionalities of the housing sector and in adding much-needed diversification to it.
Our pilot projects aim at providing housing at around two-third of the market rental prices and will become even more affordable over time. We are setting out to develop a housing model that is not only based on mutual help and co-operation, but also more sustainable: we seek to reduce the capital investment needed to build truly good quality homes, the amount of m2 per person and the energy and resource consumption induced by the construction, renovation and maintenance of the housing units. If we overcome the challenge of building our modest pilot projects, we may open the door for resident-led co-operative housing at scale in our countries. We estimate that 2.5 million people could benefit from such an approach.
Over the years, we built a network that we called MOBA – which means “self-help through mutual help” in Serbo-Croatian. In 2020, MOBA became a fully registered European Co-operative Society, a co-operative-of-co-operatives. Today, MOBA is a regional platform by and for its members, which offers technical, legal and financial support, and acts as an intermediary between local co-operatives and international partners, financial institutions and housing advocacy networks.
One of the things that we have been “self-building through mutual help” is our financial capacity. We have received support from peers, such as the ABZ housing co-operative in Zurich, and FundAction, a participatory grant-making platform for European activists. In addition, World Habitat, an international housing organization and Foundations such as Heinrich Böll are long-term supporters of MOBA, and we have built alliances with co-operative and community-led housing networks and ethical banks alike.
Today, we want to build out MOBA’s mission as a financial intermediary and its capacity to provide affordable, short-term loans to catalyze new housing projects: the MOBA accelerator. And for this, we need your support!
We are planning to issue non-member shares to organizations willing to support MOBA’s mission. The share offer is set to be launched later this year and we aim to raise 250,000 € by mid-2023. With the money we raise, MOBA will support its members’ housing initiatives through revolving loans. The loans will enable the purchase of land or buildings (by financing the down-payments of the co-operators) and renovation works. The assessment of the business cases and investment readiness of the projects applying for funds through MOBA will be done in collaboration with our partner, the Cooperative for Ethical Finance ZEF based in Croatia.
At present, we are investigating the terms for this share offer (we are looking at a minimum participation to the subscription between 5,000 to 10,000 € [approx £4,000 – £8,500) along with a (waivable) interest rate after the first two years).
If you are interested in supporting MOBA, and willing to discuss what terms would be acceptable for your organization, please contact us at [email protected]. You can also visit our website (moba.coop) and sign up to our mailing list to receive our latest updates!