There was an interest in housing co-operatives before the 1980s. The earliest known was a short-lived “urban commune” set up by members of the Melbourne Anarchist Club in Albert Park in 1888. The idea of housing co-operatives was also promoted by Frank Pulsford (1913) in the first major book on co-operatives published in Australia, Co-operation & Co-partnership.
There was also interest in housing co-operatives during and immediately after the Second World War. Munitions workers at Orange, NSW formed a co-operative in February 1942 to take over public housing then being erected in Orange. The fate of the scheme is unclear, and the co-operative was dissolved in 1950.
After the War, there were some efforts to form housing co-operatives in Sydney known as Urban Co-operative Multi-Home Units and based on an equity model of housing co-operatives drawn from European and North American models. One surviving example is the 17 Wylde Street Co-operative, originally registered under the NSW Co-operative Act on 26 February 1947 and located in Potts Point. The co-operative has a block of 40 units which are viewed as an innovative apartment building design. The NSW Labor Government amended the Co-operative Act to allow for these co-operatives, and they were financed by members subscriptions and a government guaranteed bank loan. Co-operative members could buy their apartments by weekly rental instalments, which includes maintenance, rent, rates and cleaning, and let them in approved circumstances. They also participated in the democratic governance of the co-operative. There were at least six of these co-operatives formed.
There was a surge of Australian housing co-operatives from 1981 to 1998 that can be explained by several factors. Underpinning the surge was a concern at a shortage of low rental housing for single parents, older people and the unemployed. The Brotherhood of St. Laurence with the support of local councils helped establish the Fitzroy-Collingwood Rental Housing Association in 1976 with a rental housing co-operative receiving funding from the Victorian Government.
The rise of housing co-operatives was also fuelled by a decline in government support for public housing from the 1980s with the rise of neo-liberalism. Another factor was the rise of women’s shelters for women and children escaping domestic violence. The Women’s Shelters Housing Association in SA reached an agreement with the SA Housing Trust in 1981 to form a housing co-operative to provide low-cost housing accommodation for women who were leaving shelters and waiting for public housing. They secured mortgage finance from a building society for the purchase of dwellings. The SA Government in 1991 passed legislation to establish the South Australian Community Housing Authority, which funded housing co-operatives and allowed them to elect two representatives to the Authority.
For further details, please download Greg Patmore, Nikola Balnave and Olivera Marjanovic, A History of Australian Co-operatives 1828-2023.