Senior Cooperatives - What Are They?
Cooperatives as a concept are nothing new. America has long had groups of people that have banded together to achieve a mutual goal. Some of the earliest cooperatives were agricultural. Housing cooperatives have been in existence, primarily in New York City since just before the turn of the century. 34 Gramercy Park East was built in 1883 in New York and remains in existence today. Other cooperatives were built by trade unions to provide housing to their workers. One such example are the cooperatives that housed garment workers in New York City.
A housing cooperative is a legal entity—usually a corporation—that owns real estate, consisting of one or more residential buildings. Each shareholder in the legal entity is granted the right to occupy one housing unit, sometimes subject to an occupancy agreement, which is similar to a lease. The occupancy agreement specifies the cooperative’s rules. Cooperative is also used to describe a non-share, capital cooperative model in which fee-paying members obtain the right to occupy a bedroom and share the communal resources of a house that is owned by a cooperative organization. Such is the case with student cooperatives in some college neighborhoods in the United States.
The senior housing cooperative concept began in the Twin Cities with the development of 7500 York Avenue in Edina. This 300+-unit cooperative provided a living arrangement whereby seniors could purchase the right to live in the cooperative for a modest amount of money, essentially building equity with the gradual payment of the blanket mortgage on the property. Cooperatives differ from traditional condominiums in that the corporation and its members (residents) or shareholders own the entire building, and residents purchase a right to reside in a particular unit versus a condominium, where each resident owns their unit and an interest in the common areas. Decisions are made by the members of the cooperation based on their governing rules. Becketwood Cooperative in South Minneapolis near the Mississippi River was sponsored by the Episcopal Church Home of the Twin Cities.
Very few senior cooperatives have been developed outside of the Twin Cities and the eastern seaboard. There are currently senior housing cooperatives in Florida, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas and Minnesota along with some older housing cooperatives in Maryland, New York, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois and Michigan.
Information is available at the Senior Cooperative Foundation and the National Association of Housing Cooperatives (HAHC)
0 Comments
Name and email are required. We promise not to share your email address with anyone.