Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: There was an article published in the Guardian earlier last year that reported on the state of the housing crisis in Amsterdam, whose title took a quote from one of the people that the author John Henley interviewed.
Everything is just on hold.
For a lot of people in Amsterdam, everything really is on hold, as in you're stuck where you're living, usually with several other people, unless you're a yuppie or coming from money, or you somehow got a foothold on the housing ladder right before it got incredibly diffic to do so.
My name is Cholle Clemos, failed Architecture editor, living in Amsterdam and I have struggled with housing for a while now.
But something about having the situation reported on in the paper that my parents read back in England felt like a moment.
After eight years living here, just about managing to fly under the radar in a series of cheap but temporary dwellings, the crisis really caught up with me. In late 2023, upon moving back to Amsterdam after a year in Maastricht, I had to find a new place, which then brought me face to face with the open market, where there's basically nothing available to anyone on a low income, which I have as a teacher and a writer and cultural worker.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: I've known many people who've simply given.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Up trying to live here. I almost did before luckily chancing upon another anti crack. That's an anti squat or guardian property in British parlance, where you look after an empty property by living in it without normal tenant rights in return for lower rent.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: But it wasn't that long ago that.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Amsterdam had a lot of options for people on a low income. Indeed, more than that, Amsterdam has a rich history of quite bold experiments with social housing. The Amsterdamsecholl in the 20s and 30s for instance, and also more recently the small scale urban renewal projects from the 70s and 80s, as my colleague Rene Bohr pointed out in an article he wrote a while back for failed architecture. While these light grey and pink yellow housing blocks are widely detested by the public, by dint of their perceived ugliness, they've remained relatively immune to the social housing sell off in the rest of the city centre.
At the same time as these urban renewal houses were popping up, Amsterdam was also host to a thriving autonomous housing scene. Right now I'm actually speaking to you from my studio in the Tetterode, a former type foundry that was squatted in the early 1980s and has since been turned into cooperative housing, where if you can get one of the residential apartments, it's still something like €500 per month for an apartment of around 90 square meters.
It's in this context of an accelerating housing crisis in a city with a rich history of housing activism that a group originally coming from another autonomous space, Nyuland, took advantage of a new housing law passed in 2015 that gave for the first time in the Netherlands, the legal basis for founding a housing cooperative.
They then went through the process of becoming a cooperative, establishing a shared vision, competing for the option to develop a plot of land, raising the necessary funds to build on that plot of land. Last year, breaking ground on their new building, De Neuhaus Maint, the new commons in English, and now very soon inhabiting that building in an overall process that I and a few other comrades have also begun pursuing ourselves in the past year.
The architects Dunou Maint are working with are Time to Access, a small practice composed of Mira Nekova and Andrea Vedecchia.
Earlier last year, and I'm almost done with this lengthy intro. I spoke to Andrea just as Deneur, Maine was breaking ground, and partly because of the stress of my housing situation, it's taken a long while to get this conversation out, but here it is.
We talk about, among other things, the history of cooperative housing, what it's taken to get De Neua Maind off the ground, what Time to Access do as architects of cooperative housing. And we end with some pointers about how to take up corporate cooperative housing yourself. But first, here's Andrea giving an introduction to his practice.
[00:03:57] Speaker C: So, I'm Andrea Verdekcha. I'm one of the two founders of Time to Access.
Time to Access is an architectural design Office founded in 2019.
We had a slow start because of Corona and everything, but officially started in 2019. Me and my partner Mira Nekova, we are both living and working in the Netherlands for almost 15 years.
We got experience at other architectural firms. We learned they are mainly to deal with housing sustainability and so on. And then we decided to found our own office to do things slightly different.
And we used the occasion of the new event that is our first project and is also one of the pilot housing cooperatives of Amsterdam to launch our own studio. Time to Access. And Time to Access is kind of like a call of action title or name. So there is. We wanted to give it a sort of urgency. So the time is now. You know, it's something you hear at the housing protest. And it's time to access something that is usually inaccessible for people. So this is kind of what defines us, how we try to work. And yeah, we are specialized, as said, in housing participation, sustainability. This is what we do, we have at the moment a couple of buildings under construction.
One is the Newmand, the other one is CPO Buck Stain in Amsterdam Central Maryland and we are developing other housing cooperatives. So all the projects we do more or less are variations of sort of community projects.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: The new main was probably the place where I became aware that you were who you were I suppose, I mean I knew you before then but in terms of like that being the moment I was like oh cool. Andrea and Mira doing their own thing. And it's in this area that I'm personally very interested in, I suppose cooperative housing. But like the new Amains has been quite a while in. In the making, Right. It's sort of a five year process or so, something like that. You said 2019. Yeah. And it's just, just broken ground, right?
[00:06:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: I don't know if you want to talk a little bit more about that process.
[00:06:07] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, the Nuiment is housing cooperative in Amsterdam Ost this is going to have 40 housing units and the environment started I think late 2018. So a long time ago we had in the middle a lot of crisis. Corona, Ukraine with all the construction costs are going up, the bank interest rates are going up. So it was very difficult, especially financially, it was difficult. But finally now we started building just two, three weeks ago.
So really new news. And the building is going to be completed in one year time. So people will move in in one year. The new ament is let's say a mid sized building.
There are some independent housing units, some living groups is going to have a population of around 60 people. They share many collective spaces like a big kitchen, dining, chill out room. They have a multifunctional room, a guest laundry space, communal garden. Yeah, it's a very active community. And what else? They're making a very nice building in my opinion. Also very innovative. It's built with wooden construction, is energy neutral so it ticks all the boxes I think and yeah, very proud of it.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: So you've brought it up. I think it's a thing to kind of open up a bit more the role of the architect in this kind of development. Because the way you said that just then was quite interesting. I think typically the architects of the construction would be like we've made a good building, right? Like we've put together a good design. But you quite conscious or actually not even quite. It was, it was unconscious in a sense or it felt very natural for you to say they've made a good building. And I wonder like okay, so you talked about the materials but also the kind of arrangement of things and yeah, I mean what is a cooperatively designed building in reality or like in practice? And what is the role of the architect in that?
[00:08:10] Speaker C: Yeah, they, I use the form, they made a good building because I don't want to take credit for something that we did together. So I really appreciate the work that the community, the group did and they really have all the merit in my opinion.
We were supporters of what they did.
Yeah, well, housing cooperatives is what in the Netherlands is called selfpao format. So there is an association of people that form a collective and give a collective commission to an architect.
And this can be received by an architect in very different ways.
So it can almost look like a top down project. No problem can be, you have your boundaries, the group is your client and you execute.
But with time to access, we try to do it in a different way to what we are used to.
And yeah, we have our own way and method, let's say. So we try to set up a very intensive participation process and we co produce the project together with the group. So there are some difficulties in this because the group is a collective client and is not a professional developer that needs to act as such, especially at the beginning. They rely a lot on your knowledge and the knowledge of other advisors and they learn by doing so. There is always this process of transferring your skills to the others and helping them to take decisions together.
And yeah, the people are involved from the beginning.
We usually start with what we call a process design. So even before starting co designing the building, we co design the process that will bring the group and the building into life.
And we do this with a lot of different activities, usually in workshops, sometimes just with part of the people, sometimes with the larger group.
We do storytelling activities, we do card games, position games, we evaluate alternatives together. We talk about how the building looks, but also about the program, about sustainability aspects.
And yeah, in a way we also expanded our expertise beyond architectural design. We tap into process management, governance, structures, finance.
So sometimes we do it, sometimes we do it also together with other advisors.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: You said that they had to turn to you to understand what it meant to be a developer, right? I don't know if that's a fair characterization. But that means that unlike a developer who knows usually how to be a developer, I suppose they are the ones being a developer in relation to you as an architect. But in a sense you're kind of having to learn what it means to be a developer as well, right? I suppose, yeah, that's correct.
[00:10:54] Speaker C: Like if we take the new event as example that the new amendment initiatives was a small group of people that a lot of community skills and they had their vision, they wanted to do their comparative housing, but they didn't know how to practically.
So we joined forces and we brought me, Mira and Rule Bandeseo, that is our third partner for that project. Yeah, we brought in the picture our real estate development skills because we saw it from the inside being architects of other projects.
So we knew how planning looked like, how sticko calculation so your investment cost look like.
So we brought the technical expertise, the other people brought their community expertise and together we managed to do this project.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Talking about the way that creditworthiness works within development and typically the way that the process works is that the architect is in a sense insulated from that or kept away from decisions or limited by developers because the importance of maintaining a profit margin and things like that is so important to a developer.
An architect is a kind of potential antagonist in a sense in that process because they're trying to do something different, they're not trying to make as much money as possible. And yet that dynamic does seem to have some sort of utility, at least in the development paradigm we live in. In that someone else is dealing with the hard decisions. I'm kind of putting all of this in quotation marks. The developer maintains their creditworthiness. An architect wouldn't be able to do that, yada yada yada. So there is this loss of that maybe hard headed, boring or maybe slightly profit oriented, profit maximization oriented developer in the process. I'm wondering if that turned you into the potential hard headed one or anything like that. Like how. Yeah, how do you deal with finance situations?
[00:12:50] Speaker C: Well, dynamics are very different. You are right. Like in a normal commercial development, let's say generalizing, the architect is presented with construction cost goal. Okay. So you need to make a building that costs €1800 by square meter or €2100 by square meter and that's it.
While with comparatives, because the process is very diffuse, also is based on transparency.
So we are used to see the business cases, we actually collaborate into making the business cases.
And the business cases, they're also very different because the chapter profit is not there.
So you actually have chunk of money, let's say 10% compared to a normal project, 10% that you can either cut out to reduce costs or that you can invest in other ways. So yeah, from my experience, most of the groups, they still spend those 10, 10% in quality.
So in better Materials, bigger spaces, higher ceilings, you name it. And yeah, as I said, we are also part of making the business case. So one point in the project, always you are faced with cost optimizations. You see that your building costs too much and then you find ways to bring it back into budget. And how do you do it? Usually you save on quality. Maybe you choose a cheaper brick or you do concrete instead of wood.
But for example, with the new amend, we work instead in the crux of the business case.
And yeah, we have been a bit creative. So, for example, we are not realizing the PV panel systems ourselves, but we collaborate with another cooperative and we realize the panels, we will buy the panels and we will lease cheap energy from this competitive.
So your range of influence is much broader than the materiality of the building.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Yeah, there is something quite common sense about this approach. The idea that like, what the, like 10 of this whole thing has to go to some outside investor because it's such a niche thing. And also there is probably less money around for it because, you know, a big financial investor isn't going to be interested in this because there is no element of profit. Right. Like what? Funding sources a cooperative can rely on are limited. And I suppose this could actually bring us back to like, how did they come about in the first place? Right, like, how does it. How is there even a history of cooperative development if, like that was always the case? And there is a history of cooperatives and there is a huge ecosystem of cooperatives. I used to live in a house that was run by Rochdale, and that's a peculiar name from. For someone coming from England, because it's this small town in northwest England. And I looked into it and it's because it's named after the Rochdale pioneers. The cooperative movement came from Rochdale, basically, or the principles of the cooperative movement. And then you've got this like huge housing corporation. And then if you drill down even further, like, I mean, in the 2000s, the CEO of Rochdale was nicknamed Maserati Man. How does it go from cooperative origin, named after the cooperative cradle to like this huge corporation where the guy is in prison for fraud. And how do you see what you're doing now within that history?
[00:16:20] Speaker C: Yeah, indeed. Like now if you go around in seminars, it sounds like cooperatives are a new thing, but it's absolutely not a new thing. In Amsterdam, housing competitives, or in the Netherlands, the first housing cooperative housing association, a competitive in Amsterdam was Rochdale. That was named after what you said.
And it was basically a group of workers that wanted to arrange their own housing Facilities at the beginning of 1900.
So at that moment the city was suffering really bad housing conditions with no sewage systems, very crowded apartments, working and living spaces in the same rooms. So they founded Rochdale and soon they made the first building, I think at the very beginning of the last century.
So this became kind of a popular format. And there were many housing cooperatives for workers. And the cooperatives also started to work with different housing standards, so larger spaces, more hygiene and so on.
The idea was also same as the Society of Equitable Pioneers. So the profit was shared, was a non for profit project usually being developed close to the working facilities.
Then what happened that this cooperative slowly scaled up and they became what is today known as housing corporations. So the housing corporations is what in the Netherlands, they are the bodies that provide social housing.
So when they became very big, they started to be regulated and also have fiscal incentives at national level. So the cooperative, the simple cooperative format was kind of discontinued in national law.
And in 2015 there was a new Housing act where the state reintroduced the possibility of founding housing cooperatives.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: So before that it wasn't something that you could even do. You couldn't say we're a cooperative and we want to develop together like that.
[00:18:27] Speaker C: For a long time you just couldn't do it. Or actually you could do it informally, but there was no supportive regulation for it. And if there is no supportive regulation, there are no people that give you money, for example, no city that is moving to reserve plots for you. So it was very difficult. And with this new housing act the possibility came up again.
And then Amsterdam is the first city that promoted action plan, I think that was in 2018, something like that, with an active policy to make cooperative housing. And what does this policy include?
So they reserve plots for this format, they draw up conditions in which we operate.
They set up a very important revolving fund.
So the city of Amsterdam gives a loan of about 15% is like set based on the number of units, housing units you're going to make.
So there is this gap. The banks can give you credit up to 50, 60%. Then usually you manage to bring equity for another 20% and the gap is covered by this loan.
So yeah, the city of Amsterdam is the first one that did this. And now there are other cities that try to follow setting up regulation and so on, but they are not there yet. There are some independent cases and also other type of the so called Behr Kuperazi. So the management cooperatives, with the management cooperatives, the group doesn't own the building, but they rent the Building collectively and they just manage it.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: I think that's what's happening in Teterode with the Vohenwerkpan there, like Stad Chanot are the actual owners of the building. But it's a very arm's length relationship where actually they have a lot of freedom within the building. I imagine that happens quite a lot. But yeah, curious about that. I'm a bit more familiar with Tettero. My studio is there like that there. It is a kind of outcome of the historic squatting movements. Position of strength in Amsterdam and in other parts of the Netherlands. But in a sense a kind of formalization of the relationships that kind of emerged in the 70s, 80s, 90s.
And am I right in thinking new mainties sort of got some of that, like routes. At least some of the people are kind of connected to that. Also that legacy of squatting is that.
[00:20:53] Speaker C: Yeah, the Nuiment seats come from another autonomous space in Amsterdam. It's actually a housing cooperative founded by Soweto that is called Newland. It's also here in Amsterdam almost.
So yeah, there are some rules in the squatting movement or for sure, autonomous spaces.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: I guess like that kind of leads me to this question of like, whoa, you know, like where are we at in terms of housing in general?
Why now? There is this, it seems like clamor for a way out of this that we've kind of reached a bit of an on pass or in terms of.
Yeah, the kind of private development model. I'm wondering if you kind of could speculate on like maybe why now? Like why has it kind of emerged now, like what you see then in the future for the of model?
[00:21:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I think we can look at this phenomenon at different levels.
So first, like let's say the big picture in Amsterdam there is a big shortage of housing.
And the regulators, they saw in the so called third way, the comparative movement, a way of differentiating and bringing up a new format that in the long run can be self sufficient and provide a lot of extra housing units. So this third sector position itself between commercial developers and public housing or social housing in the Netherlands.
And for the moment that needs to be heavily financed, not subsidized, but finance with loans and so on. But there's a big potential in the future because all these projects are based on credits. And in 20, 30 years time they break even and they start making profit.
But by legislation they cannot make profit.
So the cooperative members, they keep paying the rent and these extras will go back into fuel, the cooperative system.
So think of a project like the new event with 40 houses with social rent, they collect in three years, 1 million euros in rent.
Part of this rent will go back into maintenance.
Collective activities for the communities, some care for the members and so on, but most of it will be reinvested in projects for the neighborhood or into different new housing competitives.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: So it's kind of like a virtuous cycle. Right. Like eventually it will sort of grow and grow and grow.
[00:23:18] Speaker C: Indeed. So now for these first projects, it's very difficult because they cannot really count on existing co ops. But for the future, it really will grow exponentially and will also be autonomous, like the third market player. This is one. The general level.
And then I think on the more, let's say, level of the people urgency. Of course. Yeah. Now there is a big struggle. There are a lot of protests for housing, for a better housing offer. And people get very excited about comparatives because they say, yeah, the state or the market cannot really provide for us. This is a way to provide for ourselves. So that's why it's very popular.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a sort of like, element of taking back control over.
Over the kind of thing that is probably the most fundamental locus of being, in a way. Right. Is the home base. Yeah, on that. Actually, like I mentioned before in our correspondence, Friedrich Engels and the idea of the housing struggle as this sort of subordinate struggle, in a sense, to a wider problem of. And I think that we've been kind of tiptoeing around that a little bit. Yeah, this is. This is the sort of bed on which a lot of these discussions lies, but doesn't get kind of recognized as much. Is the actual mode of production being something that limits these kinds of things from really, like, flourishing because they're not playing by the rules of profit, maximization of accumulation and these sorts of things that also the way that it fundamentally challenges balances of power. I think cooperatives can be quite provocative in a way, but they can also be a sort of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic sort of situation. I'm wondering how you feel like, having been in the trenches. Right. Of housing cooperative development. Like. Yeah. How you feel about how it fits into wider struggles or like wider kind of cooperative movement. Like you mentioned that you're kind of working with cooperatives outside of the industry. So, like, I'm going to stop talking now.
How do you feel about the, I guess, wider ramifications and where this sits within maybe more progressive developments in society?
[00:25:37] Speaker C: Well, I guess housing cooperatives is like a reaction to the neoliberal housing markets with all its problems.
So in a way it is outside the market because it's not for profit. You cannot sell the house, you cannot split. It stays in the same property regime forever.
But at the same time it's also completely dependent on regulators. Right. So this is not like a bottom up idea to come up with housing competitors. Yeah, okay. There was certain type of lobbying, but it's also conscious state decision to make it happen. And it really needs a lot of state or city, local governments push to really make it the entire sector off the ground.
So it needs to operate in this ecosystem. And only history would say if we will succeed or not. But cooperatives in general, they come with a very important value that is autonomy.
So if we succeed, and we succeed also to gain the type of autonomy we need, we will also be liberated from a lot of the market constraints because we can set up these supportive structures that subsidize themselves.
And yeah, I really see a great potential and I think as soon as you tap into the cooperative movement, you really understand what type of potential there is.
So, yeah, I think very fascinating.
And there's this very interesting essay writing from a friend of us, Federico Savini is a scholar here, Tuva. He has a course in urban planning that he talks about the property of cooperatives, of nesting and federating. So what these cooperatives do, they replicate their structure internally and externally. And this is their way of creating a bigger structure, like a fractal.
So to make the example of the new amend, there are a lot of sub projects in the project that look like the new ament government.
So for example, inside the big house there are the bond groups, the living groups, that they have their own autonomy. There is a project for elderly housing. Inside the project there is a project of cooperative energy that invests the neighborhood. There are alliances with schools nearby to make educational projects. There is a permacultural garden nearby that will do their green roof and so on. So cooperatives are kind of this. Yeah, political body that expands, you know.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Slowly, like a virus.
[00:28:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like a good one.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: Yeah. There is a kind of infectious quality to this sort of experience of autonomy. And to my mind, I think that is probably why it's so restrained. One of the things I wanted us to talk about was about like, why, why, like such a common sense idea of autonomy has not had as much register in terms of solutions to decommodified housing compared to social housing. Right. Like why is it that cooperatives have taken a bit of a backseat historically to social Housing. And I, I have to think that like there is this element of power that intercedes to prevent it. You know, it's. I, I don't think that ruling strata is very interested in nurturing experiments with self governance or taking back control, really genuine things like that. It has to be something that takes its position through force in a sense or like through energy and, and through the force of its arguments and the kind of efforts of the people who are committed to the ideal. Whereas social housing is a historic concession because of the threat. I mean, at least my understanding of it in Britain, like social housing and the NHS are a result of fear of the working class. It was like, okay, we need to sort of buy them off, but we'll do it in this way that's very top down. We'll give them very minimal control of anything that they do and slowly but surely kind of, I guess discipline and yeah, restrain that and then sell it off in the end because then, yeah, and like I guess doing all of the cooperative effort, like it prevents that, that possibility of it being sold off as well. And that comes back. Sorry, I keep going on but like the, this Rochdale fellow, I have to get his name.
Maserati man, you know, like it, like that happened because it was possible to sell off the housing.
[00:30:15] Speaker C: Yeah. As we said before, housing competitives are not on the sideline, but they were the start of public housing in the Netherlands. So very important role.
And as you said, I agree with you, the format was heavily regulated because of its potential and was transformed into what is now housing corporations.
And in the Netherlands something very specific happened when they reintroduced the housing comparatives in the housing act of 2015.
So if we compare it to other countries in Europe, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, their housing cooperatives, they are free to grow. So usually what happens is that there is an independent group of people, they set up their first project and then as soon as they have usually the financial meanings, they make a second cooperative, they make a third cooperative and they grow up. And there are cooperatives now with 200, 300,000 housing units in Switzerland. Okay, so they are like what are in the Netherlands? Housing corporations, but they are autonomous. The housing competitives and the owners of the housing competitives are the people that live in their houses.
But in the Netherlands this is not possible because all housing cooperatives, they need to be independent one off projects.
So you cannot make the new amendment to.
You can only give your money to another independent cooperatives.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: So there's still some room for it, but it's harder to. Yeah, it's not as legally supported as.
[00:31:43] Speaker C: Let'S say this is their way of, of limiting power of these organizations. There are some very interesting attempts of federating already here in the Netherlands and in Amsterdam for example there is freikop, these umbrella organizations that supports different cooperatives. So it's like a network.
What happens for example in Switzerland is that these cooperatives growing, they share their financial means from project to project. They also have a continuity of expertise, of skills of knowledge that go from one project to the other.
[00:32:16] Speaker B: Of course, yeah, yeah.
[00:32:17] Speaker C: And yeah, it's much more difficult because of this one off project.
So we need to find other strategies. Fry cop. So federating is one way changing the law perhaps? Yeah, lobbying into changing the law. Yeah, of course this is important. Then also the expertise of people like us can give continuity from project to project.
So we see that for us the first project was very difficult and now continuing we share our knowledge. Also co ops do it by themselves. Like they share their templates.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:50] Speaker C: Their business models.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: There is something that reminds me of the conversation I had with Rhian Jones about her book Paint yout Town Red which is sort of based on this notion of community wealth building which runs parallel or is a bit of a catch all term for various co op type practices. The like act of being real in the world has this infectious quality as well. Right. Like that showing that it's possible means that other people suddenly decide okay, let's do this ourselves. I mean from a personal perspective in its early days, like I know that the group I'm working with on setting up a co op development process, whatever, was very much fueled by this inspiring reality. Right. That it's actually happening. It's not coincidental that it's the moment of new mains breaking ground that gave a bit of a boost to this, this like conversation that's been going on between friends for a while. I'd say in itself the fact that it exists is really great. An angle or a perspective that you have a unique or quite specific experience with is, is your position as an architect. Right. And we already talked about it a bit but like maybe you a bit more about the difficulties or surprises or impediments etc like positive negatives of working with contractors that don't have this experience of cooperatives and also just sort of engaging with maybe the architectural profession and the building industry and suppliers and things like that. What's it been like being the mediator between that and this strange new concept of cooperatives? At least strange to the eyes of the people that you're interacting with.
[00:34:38] Speaker C: Well, in the Netherlands there is the cpo. So the collective private commission format that is quite known for a while so was one of the main responses to 2008 economic crisis. While a lot of commercial projects stopped the self bough CPOs, they continue to exist.
So the industry makes this comparison. And cooperatives for a builder or for an advisor, for a structural engineer is not so different from a cpo. It's basically a collective commission. Yeah. Okay. What is a bit different from a normal project is that the stakeholders, they need to communicate with the client in a different way.
Sometimes they're a bit confused like who is the client. So in terms of this kind of experts in the building industry sector, it's kind of okay. It's not so strange. I think what is more difficult is like on the financing side and on the state or city government's side that is more complicated because simply like it was not done in this way earlier. And regulation comes to happen by doing, by experimenting. So in Amsterdam for example, there are these three projects. De Waren that is already was built last year.
Biasdorp just completed. I think the people moved in recently and the new event that be finished next year. These three were the three pilots of the city. And the city of Amsterdam just experimented by doing, learned by doing. Also the banks, they don't have any package to offer to cooperatives. They don't know what's the format. They don't know how for example to do this bebop scan. It's like to understand where the money come from. If they are legal, illegal money. Who is the owner of these buildings, where are the money coming from? The new amount raised €450,000 in crowdfunding from maybe 300 different people. How do you scan the source of this money? Also like the fund from the city of Amsterdam, very complicated. And nobody had a clue before the new event how to set it up. There have been many meetings of experts at all levels to set this up. So yeah, this is more like the people that needs to get used to it.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Oh, it's super interesting. Like the way that like a new thing comes to be that there has to be this kind of catching up of just like the.
Even the language of like how you talk about these kinds of things. Like the. The way that you interact and yeah, like such a lot to it.
[00:37:07] Speaker C: Yeah. And yeah, this projects I hate they were pioneers. But these first projects, they're really opening the ground for the new projects to come. Most of them are very Open to share knowledge. There are some experts, like, we collaborate frequently with the financial advisor Jasper Clavwyk from Kantelligen, and I think he's advising 90% of the cooperatives in Amsterdam and he's also advising the Gemente in setting up their funds, the banks. We have a regular talk with Rabobank, that is the only bank in the Netherlands to offer package to housing cooperatives. So there is all this knowledge, all this ferment happening and yeah, it's going to happen.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Yeah. So like, last thing I suppose is what are some of the basic need to knows for someone who's. Who's thinking about this? Or like in the early stages also, maybe like a sense of what happens in a co op, how is it constituted, how is sovereignty developed in that kind of situation? Where is the sovereignty in the sense of like, how are decisions made in weekly meetings, etc. But also like, maybe like not just people who are thinking of getting involved, but like because of our remit as speaking to the architecture or a sort of young architect, like, how does it. Yeah, a young architect kind of get their head around how they get involved in this. I think that's enough for you to chew on.
[00:38:33] Speaker C: Very long question. Yeah, okay. I try to keep it simple, like tricks and tips. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a very.
I think it's a great and very enjoyable process, both for citizens, cops, members and also for professionals.
But at the same time it's also a very hard process and requires a lot of work from the volunteers. Also, as architects, as professionals, you're going to put a lot of extra hours in what you do.
So we don't work for profit either.
And it's a process that usually from the moment you have the first talk with friends until you move in, it will take at least five years if everything goes right. So it's also a long process, but it's really worth it also that you're not just building a house.
So most of the people, when they get into it, they think, okay, I need a house, let's make it ourselves. But then soon after they understand that it's much more than that. So I usually say that these comparatives, they start having power from the very beginning when they form, when there is a group of people that meet in a room and discuss what's their vision for the future. They already have such influence on the CET or like the. I think the example of the bundle is striking. So the bundle is housing cooperative. They started, I think we started to work together a couple of Years ago. They didn't start officially the development phase yet. They have a plot, they have an option agreement for a plot. But we will start I think around the summer to work together and they are going to realize 130 apartments in New West.
And this started with a small group of people from the neighborhood, very interested and politically active in gentrification that is now transforming a new West. They said, okay, we need to find a way of resisting. They founded the co op and the COP immediately was a catalyzer for a lot of energies in the area.
And because of the bundle, new organization started together with other association and they founded New west in Verset. So there is a lot going on even before they started the development phase.
So it's not only a house, it's much more than that.
And also it can be for everyone. Like you don't need so much money for it.
Like usually COP members, they put something between 100,000, 500 to maybe €10,000 of your own money and the rest you. You do it with collective loans. So it can really be for everyone. But you need this time, time to invest and drive. Yeah, of course.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: That thing of it being something that has this existing from the beginning power to it is really inspiring because like I find this with some of the activist work I do as well. This sense of like the commitment to a long term project that might not see any returns for you at all, that it's just good to commit to something good or that might be beneficial to someone in the future or whatever, like. But also the experience of the. Of the struggle to take some control over your life has a sort of benefit in itself. Cool. Well, I don't know if you wanted to like promote anything or like talk about anything that's going on with time to access or.
[00:41:59] Speaker C: Yeah, okay. I wrote down for myself some resources for everyone to check. There are a lot of resources already available.
Some are listed on our website, timetoaccess.com also we give free consultations to groups. So we have a kind of subsidizing scheme where we advise cooperatives for free until they get real opportunity for a piece of land. So it's one of our motives, let's say share knowledge.
Also there is Stichting von in Amsterdam and Coplink, they organize thematic courses for free for the initiation phase. So you get thematic course about finance, what to expect from co design process and so on. And they're also starting to make courses elsewhere in Utrecht. They started recently.
Coplink has very resourceful website also they have a podcast series about cooperative housing. There are also some interesting publications specific to the Netherlands. There is a manual from Stickling Bonn, a book called Operazi Bonk Operazzi that talks about reference with examples abroad and the failed experience of housing cooperative in Rotterdam, and a new book from Colab of Tudelf called Together and also many of the cooperatives, at least in Amsterdam, they are open to external members or volunteers.
So also a good way to check in is to go into these meetings, maybe work for a competitive for a little while, for a few months to see how are the internal dynamics and see if it is for you or not.
