How housing turned residents into consumers—and began selling belonging back to them as an amenity.
The commodification of community may be one of the most profound changes in housing over the last century. It is not primarily an architectural change, but a change in what we believe a house is.
A house can be shelter, property, inheritance, security, workplace, investment, community, or simply the place where ordinary life unfolds. These meanings are not mutually exclusive. The problem begins when one becomes powerful enough to reorganise all the others.
For most of human history, housing was not merely a finished object delivered by a specialised industry. It was also a social technology: a way of organising care, labour, protection, learning, production and coexistence. Collective forms of living long predate contemporary cohousing. Monasteries, extended households, farms, workshops and countless other arrangements combined private life with common resources and mutual responsibility.
Modern cohousing did not invent communal life. It formalised one contemporary version of something much older.
That is not an invitation to romanticise the past. Historical communities could be hierarchical, coercive and deeply unequal. Privacy, individual rights and the ability to leave unwanted social arrangements are achievements worth protecting. Anyone who has experienced the tyranny of the family, village, church or commune hardly needs a sermon about the virtues of a locked door.
The question is one of balance between autonomy and interdependence.
Over time, much of housing in industrialised societies moved decisively in another direction. The dwelling became increasingly individualised, standardised and financially legible. Ownership, regulation, banking, taxation and planning progressively organised the home as an economic unit.
Housing moved from being primarily understood through use toward being increasingly understood through exchange.
Privatisation and enclosure → commodification → financialisation
These processes are related, but they are not identical. Privatisation concerns ownership and control. Commodification means that housing is increasingly understood as something to be bought and sold. Financialisation goes further: housing becomes organised according to the expectations, measurements and interests of financial markets.
Through that transformation something else happens. Residents become consumers. Shared space becomes an amenity. Participation becomes a service.
Eventually, community itself becomes a product.
Privatisation: when ownership becomes the objective
Private ownership can offer independence, stability and protection. There is nothing inherently wrong with owning one's home. The problem begins when home ownership becomes the principal measure of housing success.
Across many countries, housing policy has encouraged private ownership as a social objective in itself. Britain's Right to Buy programme is one of the clearest examples: public housing was progressively transformed into privately owned property.
Once a dwelling becomes privately owned, however, it does more than provide shelter. It becomes savings, inheritance, collateral, pension strategy and investment.
The owner therefore acquires two interests that are not always compatible. As a resident, the owner wants housing to remain accessible, stable and inexpensive. As an asset holder, the same owner benefits when property values rise.
A society can demand affordable housing politically while depending economically on housing becoming less affordable.
If the value of my house doubles, I may interpret this as prosperity. Yet nothing about the house itself necessarily improved. The rooms did not become twice as warm. The walls did not become twice as useful. The neighbourhood did not suddenly contain twice as much land.
What changed was its exchange value.
For someone already inside the market, this can produce wealth. For someone trying to enter it, the same process produces exclusion.
A housing market can therefore appear financially healthy while becoming socially unhealthy. Rising prices are routinely described as good news even when they mean that teachers, nurses, artists, young families and service workers can no longer afford to live in the cities that depend on them.
Ownership answers one important question—who owns the building?—but it does not answer the others: who uses it, who maintains it, who decides what happens there, who carries the risk, and who captures increases in value produced by public infrastructure, cultural life and generations of collective investment?
Ownership is not the end of the argument. It is where the argument begins.
Commodification: from use-value to exchange-value
Commodification takes the process further. Housing becomes increasingly valuable not only because of what it allows people to do, but because of what it can be sold for.
The distinction between use-value and exchange-value is fundamental.
Use-value asks what a place can actually do. Can somebody live there? Can children play there? Can an elderly person remain independent? Can somebody work there? Can an old classroom become a bedroom? Can a school hall become a concert space? Can residents grow food, share tools, organise childcare or create work?
Exchange-value asks a different question: what is this property worth?
These forms of value do not need to oppose one another. A useful building should possess economic value. The difficulty begins when exchange-value is allowed to overrule use.
A home can then become economically successful while remaining empty. A neighbourhood can become more valuable precisely while the people who created its cultural value are displaced from it. A perfectly usable municipal building can become a “liability” because another development promises a clearer financial return.
An empty office can remain an office simply because changing its use would disturb the regulatory and financial categories through which it has already been valued.
A school becomes a plot.
A home becomes an asset class.
A neighbourhood becomes a market.
The obscenity is not that somebody makes money. Profit is not inherently immoral. The problem begins when the certainty of human need—people must live somewhere—becomes the guarantee behind a financial return while the people themselves have almost no influence over the system.
This is also why the preference for new construction cannot be separated from the financial organisation of housing. As discussed in The Myth of New Construction, standardised new buildings provide predictable margins, predictable ownership arrangements and predictable risk profiles. They fit established systems of permitting, insurance, valuation and finance.
Existing buildings are messier. They contain unknown structures, memories, irregular spaces, obsolete technical systems and uses that change over time. Renovation requires interpretation.
Community is similarly difficult to standardise.
A financial model prefers legibility.
A community produces complexity.
A spreadsheet is not malicious. It is merely illiterate in every language except price.
Financialisation: when the house becomes a balance sheet
Commodification makes housing tradable. Financialisation changes the scale and logic of that trade.
Housing scholar Manuel Aalbers describes financialisation as the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives across states, firms and households.
The important point is not simply that money entered housing.
Money was already there.
Financialisation means that housing is increasingly required to justify itself in the language of finance. Risk must be priced. Returns must be forecast. Property must be categorised. Projects must become bankable. Ownership structures must be intelligible to lenders.
Anything unusual becomes more difficult to finance.
And so the conventional apartment has a huge institutional advantage: everybody already understands it. The bank understands it. The insurer understands it. The planning authority understands it. The developer understands it. The buyer understands it.
A collectively governed building with unusual combinations of private and shared space introduces uncertainty into all of those systems.
One cohousing community, for example, struggled to obtain conventional financing precisely because the bank did not know how to interpret its collective ownership arrangement. The residents consequently had to assume much of the role normally taken by a developer.
Institutions often interpret what is familiar as safe and what is unfamiliar as risky.
Sometimes this is genuine risk assessment.
Sometimes it is habit wearing the costume of expertise.
The same contradiction appears in Finland. How can political support for cooperatives and cohousing coexist with plot allocation, pricing and development systems that continue to favour conventional actors?
A more uncomfortable possibility follows: participation may be encouraged only until it begins to challenge the structures through which economic value is distributed.
Participation is welcome when it decorates decisions.
It becomes troublesome when it redistributes power.
That does not mean public ownership automatically produces democracy, or that private ownership automatically destroys it. Cooperatives can become exclusive. Governments can decentralise responsibilities simply to reduce public expenditure. Private organisations can sometimes create genuine forms of collective control.
A better test is therefore not simply who formally owns the building?
Where does the power actually lie?
What disappeared along the way
The transformation of housing into an increasingly standardised asset affects more than prices. It also changes which kinds of living arrangements appear normal.
Communal living, cooperatives, extended households and other arrangements based on mutual responsibility increasingly appear as deviations from the dominant housing type.
Finnish history itself contains shared rural arrangements, workers' housing, cooperatives and other collective models, yet contemporary housing systems usually begin from the assumption of a clearly bounded individual household.
This produces a curious contradiction.
We worry about loneliness while constructing systems around individual consumption.
We praise community while minimising the need for neighbours.
We promote citizen participation while professionalising almost every responsibility connected to buildings.
We celebrate sharing while measuring housing primarily through privately controlled square metres.
The detached house or private apartment is not the enemy. People may legitimately want silence, privacy, gardens, security and autonomy.
Gamified Cohousing should never become another ideology telling everybody how they ought to live.
The democratic problem is not individual housing.
It is the disappearance of meaningful alternatives.
A healthy housing system should accommodate different relationships between private and shared life. People should be able to live alone, but also collectively. They should be able to own property, but also participate in credible forms of cooperative ownership. They should be able to purchase professional services, but also contribute to the places where they live.
Instead, communal arrangements are repeatedly required to explain why they differ from a supposed norm.
There is an irony here. Collective living is ancient. The strange historical development is the idea that the completely self-contained housing consumer represents the neutral condition from which everything else must justify its deviation.
And the isolated consumer is, of course, an excellent customer.
Every household needs its own tools, its own car, its own spare room, its own appliances, its own professional services, its own solution to every problem that neighbours once helped solve together.
Independence can be liberating. Isolation can also be commercially efficient.
The Commodification of Community: when belonging becomes a product
Here the story takes another turn.
Once social isolation becomes visible as a problem, community itself acquires market value.
And once something acquires market value, it can be packaged and sold.
This is the deeper logic of the commodification of community.
The market is not embarrassed by loneliness. It simply looks for a subscription model.
This helps explain the growth of commercial co-living.
Traditional cohousing generally combines meaningful private space with substantial common areas and some degree of resident participation or collective responsibility. Housing cooperatives go further by involving residents in ownership or management.
Commercial co-living can use much of the same architectural vocabulary while reversing the political relationship: small private rooms, large shared kitchens, lounges, events, digital applications, community managers and a brand promising belonging.
The most cynical version follows a peculiar sequence: housing is organised in ways that intensify isolation; isolation is then identified as a lifestyle problem; finally, community is sold back as a premium amenity.
But a common room does not necessarily create a commons.
A hotel lobby is not a republic.
The problem is not co-living itself. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to operate managed housing, serviced apartments and shared facilities.
The problem begins when communal space becomes a means of reducing private floor area and increasing revenue per square metre while most meaningful decisions remain controlled by an external company.
Cohousing without shared agency is hospitality.
The resident may consume the experience of community without gaining meaningful control over the institution producing it.
So the relevant question is not merely whether the building contains a large kitchen or whether residents attend communal dinners. Who owns the kitchen? Who decides what happens there? Can residents change its use? If shared spaces create financial value, who receives it? Can residents change the governance system? Can they dismiss the manager? Can they collectively alter the building?
Community cannot be measured only in square metres of shared space. It must also be measured in power.
This is why the commodification of community is not primarily an aesthetic problem.
It is a political one.
Portugal: housing can move in both directions
Portugal provides an unusually revealing comparison because, within a relatively short historical period, it shows very different answers to the question of what housing is for.
After the revolution of 1974, the SAAL programme — Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local brought architects, technical teams and neighbourhood organisations together through a bottom-up process of housing production.
The essential change was deceptively simple: architects could work with residents rather than merely for them.
The São Victor project in Porto, associated with Álvaro Siza and the local residents' association, is especially significant. Rather than clearing the existing neighbourhood in order to replace it with a supposedly rational new object, the project attempted to preserve the existing urban fabric and community relationships while introducing architectural and technical improvements.
SAAL was not a perfect model. It emerged from an exceptional revolutionary moment, generated conflicts and left many projects unfinished.
Its importance here is conceptual.
The resident was not treated merely as the final customer.
The resident became a source of knowledge and a participant in production.
Housing was a process through which political, technical and local intelligence met.
Portugal simultaneously strengthened its cooperative housing framework. The provisional government described state-supported housing cooperativism as an important contribution to solving the housing problem, while Decreto-Lei 730/74 established a legal framework for housing cooperation.
What makes Portugal especially useful here, however, is that the story does not end there.
Lisbon later became an important case in research on housing financialisation. Research on Lisbon's historic centre examines the growing use of residential property as an investment vehicle and the rise of short-term rental as one frontier of financialisation after 2012.
The contrast is striking.
How can residents, neighbourhood organisations and architects produce housing together?
becomes
How can residential property circulate efficiently through international investment markets?
The same country can treat housing as a civic process and, within living memory, increasingly treat it as a portfolio asset.
No appeal to economic inevitability survives that comparison.
Portugal should not be reduced to a morality play in which one period was good and another bad. Its housing history contains public, private, cooperative and market approaches.
That complexity is precisely why it matters.
Housing institutions are not natural phenomena. They are political choices made durable through law, finance and administration.
And what has been politically constructed can be politically changed.
Can housing be taken partly out of the speculative market?
If financialisation is built through institutions, alternatives also need institutions.
Good intentions are not enough.
A group may establish an affordable community, renovate a building collectively and create enormous social value. Twenty years later, the property may have multiplied in market value.
What happens then?
If every resident can simply sell their share at full market value, one generation may privately capture value created by collective labour, public infrastructure and previous generations.
The community may disappear precisely because it succeeded.
Community Land Trusts
Community Land Trusts attempt to separate long-term community control of land from conventional property speculation. In models such as the London Community Land Trust, resale mechanisms are intended to preserve affordability for subsequent households rather than allowing unrestricted market appreciation.
The principle matters more than the precise formula:
Affordability should survive the first resident.
Affordable housing that becomes unaffordable at the first resale has not solved the problem.
It has merely selected the first beneficiary.
LILAC and Mutual Home Ownership
The LILAC project in Leeds uses a Mutual Home Ownership Society model. Residents participate collectively in the financial structure rather than treating each dwelling purely as an independent speculative asset.
This is easier to understand visually than through another page of financial terminology:
In the LILAC model, contributions relate partly to household income, while equity appreciation is linked to local earnings rather than simply tracking surrounding property prices.
The model has limitations. What happens, for example, to people with extremely low or no income? Could collective borrowing introduce risks that residents cannot individually control? Could an intentionally cohesive community also become socially exclusive?
These are real questions.
But the model demonstrates something much larger:
The financial architecture of housing can itself be designed.
Architects routinely design wall assemblies, drainage systems and fire compartments.
Why should ownership be treated as something beyond design?
Mietshäuser Syndikat
The German Mietshäuser Syndikat pushes the argument further.
Its model connects individual house projects with a wider network through an ownership structure designed to prevent properties from later returning freely to the speculative market. Established projects also contribute towards supporting new ones.
This introduces an uncomfortable but important democratic question:
Should today's residents possess an unrestricted right to privatise value created collectively?
The instinctive answer of the conventional property system is immediate:
Owners own.
But slogans are not arguments.
If land was subsidised, renovation relied on communal labour, infrastructure was publicly funded, and previous generations accepted limited returns in exchange for lasting affordability, the answer becomes less obvious.
Ownership can include obligations towards people who do not yet live there.
A democratic institution may owe something not only to its current members, but to its future ones.
East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative
The East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative approaches similar questions through community-oriented investment, resale restrictions and mixed-use property.
That final point is particularly relevant to Gamified Cohousing because a community is not merely a collection of bedrooms. Local businesses, workshops and other economic activities are part of the housing ecosystem.
None of these models should simply be copied. Their legal environments differ. Their social contexts differ. Their weaknesses differ.
But together they demonstrate something important:
Speculation is not inevitable simply because private property exists.
Legal and financial structures determine how much value becomes individual, how much remains collective, and whether affordability survives from one generation to another.
We already design markets.
The deception is pretending that the present design is nature.
From consumer back to citizen
When housing becomes a commodity, residents increasingly exercise power through consumption.
Rent this apartment or another one. Buy this house or another one. Accept this property manager or move. Pay for this maintenance service or another.
The market offers choice.
But choice is not the same thing as participation.
A consumer can leave.
A citizen must also learn how to stay and negotiate.
This goes to the heart of Gamified Cohousing.
Democracy is not only voting in national elections. It is also the everyday practice of encountering people whose interests differ from ours and developing mechanisms through which those differences can coexist.
Housing once contained many such negotiations naturally. Who repairs the roof? Who cleans the stair? Who looks after the garden? Who pays for what? Who may use which room? What happens when one person contributes more than another?
Professionalisation can remove much of this friction, often beneficially.
But if every shared responsibility is outsourced, something else disappears with the inconvenience:
agency.
A disagreement that might once have required a meeting becomes a complaint to a manager.
A shared problem becomes a service ticket.
A neighbour becomes another user of the building.
The resident may be spared the argument and deprived of citizenship in the same transaction.
That does not mean residents should replace electricians, structural engineers, doctors, municipal authorities or other professionals. Nor should “community participation” become an excuse for unpaid labour.
The challenge is to rebuild the territory between two extremes: the isolated consumer who controls nothing beyond the interior of a private unit, and the completely managed resident for whom every meaningful decision has been delegated elsewhere.
Housing can become civic infrastructure again.
That requires more than common rooms.
It requires structures through which people have meaningful capacity to act.
This is why the answer cannot simply be more cohousing.
Cohousing can itself become a commodity. Shared kitchens can become branding. Community can become an amenity. Participation can become an event organised once a month by a property-management company.
Reversing the commodification of community therefore requires more than shared rooms. It requires shared agency.
How can private autonomy coexist with collective responsibility? How can ownership provide security without making unlimited speculation its principal reward? How can common areas become actual commons rather than marketing features? How can residents contribute without replacing professional labour? How can part of the value created collectively remain within the community that produced it?
An old sentence from Gamified Cohousing captured the ambition rather well:
Buy into a community, not into a mortgage.
Taken literally, that sentence is too simple.
Communities need finance. Mortgages are not inherently harmful. Private property is not the enemy.
But as a reversal of priorities, the phrase remains useful.
The asset should serve the life around it.
The community should not exist merely to service the asset.
Previous articles such as The End of Accessible Housing and The Myth of New Construction examined how regulation, demolition and the preference for new construction progressively remove architecture from the hands of ordinary citizens.
The commodification of community adds the economic dimension.
A building can escape demolition and still cease to function as civic infrastructure if control over its ownership, value and everyday governance becomes detached from the people living inside it.
The task is not to abolish markets or worship community.
It is to prevent the market from becoming the only language in which community is permitted to exist.
The next question is practical:
What happens if some of that control is deliberately returned to the people who use, maintain and inhabit buildings?
That is where the Gamified Cohousing method begins.
Pedro Aibéo
Kannus, 20 August 2026
Aalbers, M. B. (2017). The Variegated Financialization of Housing. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(4), 542–554.
Aguilar Dominguez, G. (2019). Housing Financialization in Lisbon's Historical Center. Universidade de Lisboa.
Canadian Centre for Architecture / Museu de Serralves. The SAAL Process: Housing in Portugal 1974–76, including São Victor, Porto.
Chatterton, P. (2013). Towards an agenda for post-carbon cities: Lessons from LILAC, the UK's first ecological, affordable cohousing community. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(5), 1654–1674.
Conaty, P., Birchall, J., Bendle, S., & Foggitt, R. (2003). Common Ground – for Mutual Home Ownership.
Decreto-Lei n.º 730/74, 20 December 1974. Regime Jurídico da Cooperação Habitacional, Portugal.
Instituto da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana. Habitação: 100 anos de Políticas Públicas em Portugal, 1918–2018.
Jakobsen, P., & Larsen, H. G. (2018). An alternative for whom? The evolution and socio-economy of Danish cohousing. Urban Research and Practice.
