Housing co-operatives: paths to tenant control and housing satisfaction?

As housing policy and practice in the early 1990s places increasing emphasis on the user this thesis aims to understand the role of user-controlled housing, in this case housing co-ops, in providing residents with control of the housing process and satisfaction in housing through resident involvement in management and maintenance. This is achieved through an examination of the, thus far neglected, user-controlled literature in relation to housing policy and practice. This review suggests that resident involvement in the decision-making process in production or management and maintenance will provide residents of housing co-ops with greater satisfaction than passive consumers and that the user-controlled process aids in the retention of communities and promotes self-confidence. These issues, which form the intuitively plausible research propositions are then subjected to empirical scrutiny, taking as the focus the unexplored area of residents’ involvement in decision-making in management and maintenance. Before the empirical data is considered the meaning of housing satisfaction is considered. This suggests that housing satisfaction has to be understood beyond the narrow conception of satisfaction as a product of architectural determinism and that it is rather, a dynamic process based around the product of prevailing economic, social, political and cultural relations. The location of the study is Liverpool. Members of the new-build par-value co-ops were surveyed concerning their attitudes to and opinions of self-management. Furthermore, par-value co-ops are demonstrated to be the 'purest' from of housing co-op provision. The provision of housing co-operatives in Liverpool are a product of the dynamics of social relations within the locality and this, in turn, is a product of central-local relations, community-local relations and the segmented, partial and uneven development of housing co-ops throughout Britain. The research concludes that user-control of the decision-making process in management and maintenance contributed towards high levels of member satisfaction with their homes and management services. However, within the context of new-build co-ops, production issues were also of crucial importance. Members' ability to control production and management and maintenance issues as well as a number of the wider factors, identified as significant in determining housing satisfaction, all contributed towards members satisfaction. The broader implications of these conclusions relate to the significance of the home in the 1990s. It has been suggested elsewhere that owner occupation provides home owners with a particular form of security and, what is more, a form of security only obtainable within this form of ownership. This suggestion relates to the concept of 'ontological security' which is a product of control, self and identity. The findings of this research, in the Liverpool new-build co-ops, suggests that this security is also obtainable within the differing form of collective ownership provided by housing co-operatives.