majority of Swiss are renters<\/a>, partly because home prices are so high.) Even in Zurich, Switzerland\u2019s financial capital, nearly one in five apartments is a co-op, and the city aims to make it one in three by 2050.<\/p>\nAnd yet, awareness of co-ops can be low, or stigmatized. Ms. del Rizzo said the model was tarnished by the 2008 financial crisis, when a number of them collapsed. And many people have an image of cooperatives as refuges for \u201cold hippies and a collection of free-love people,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember meeting someone in the real estate business, and when I brought up the subject of cooperatives, he said, \u2018No thanks. I have no interest in sharing a shower with someone,\u2019\u201d Ms. del Rizzo said.<\/p>\n
Although some Swiss co-ops are infused with a kibbutz-style sharing ethos, others, like Mr. Waelti\u2019s, resemble conventional apartment buildings, where neighbors might not even know each other.<\/p>\n
One of the newer co-op buildings in Lausanne, Le Bled, has plenty of opportunities for community involvement. Founded by architects, it has a movie theater, a music practice room, a library, a laundromat and a wood shop. Children often wander from apartment to apartment and play together until the dinner bell rings. Hortense and Victoire Decosterd, 11-year-old twins, have pajama parties with their friends. For Halloween, they organized a treasure hunt.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn weekends they leave the apartment at eight in the morning, they find their friends and come back at lunch with three other girls,\u201d said their stepmother, Tania Zambrano Ovalle.<\/p>\n
Ms. Zambrano Ovalle, 55, said her neighbors still keep a degree of distance from one another, though residents of the Bled have set up WhatsApp groups to help one another with things like errands and child care. She treasures that camaraderie. \u201cThere\u2019s not only a crisis of housing in the world, but a crisis of loneliness,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
But the key attraction to co-op living for Ms. Zambrano Ovalle and her husband, Jean-Gilles Decosterd, is the rent: 2,400 francs (around $3,000) a month for their light-filled, three-bedroom place. \u201cWe realized that a commercial apartment of the same size would be around 1,000 francs more expensive,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
One condition of moving in: The couple needed to buy shares for around 25,000 francs ($31,000) \u2014 more than a typical security deposit, but a fraction of what a down payment would cost on a similar home.<\/p>\n
A visitor could mistake the Bled for one of the countless pricey Swiss condominiums that cater to wealthier citizens. Completed in 2023, it has picture windows and is trimmed with an expensive specialty timber known as meleze. From the roof terrace, the snowy pinnacle of Mont Blanc is visible across Lake Geneva.<\/p>\n
The co-op thrives on a mix of wealthier residents who bought their units and thus injected cash into the project, and working-class tenants whose apartments are subsidized by the city, according to Laurent Guidetti, an architect who helped design the building and is one of the leaders of the cooperative. He said the residents include musicians, teachers, electricians, engineers, a wine salesman, an economist, a journalist, a psychologist, a janitor and retired people.<\/p>\n
The city of Lausanne gave the co-op a 90-year lease that was cheaper than other housing projects, and bought shares in the co-op for lower-income residents. Natacha Litzistorf, the city councilwoman in Lausanne in charge of housing, architecture and the environment, said cooperative housing can help forestall the extreme segregation of rich and poor and help a city live \u201cat peace with itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen people meet each other, get to know each other, they are less afraid of each other and there is less risk of any violence in neighborhoods,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The city was also attracted to the project for environmental reasons. The Bled, which has 230 residents, has a heat pump that provides all of the building\u2019s hot water. Solar panels generate a third of its electricity. Rooftop gardens are watered with recycled rainwater. Residents are not allowed to have washing machines in their apartments; they must use the high-efficiency ones in the building\u2019s laundromat.<\/p>\n
Mr. Guidetti, 54, makes furniture in the wood shop in the basement, and he\u2019s experimenting with a composting toilet. He bought his own 1,500-square-foot apartment in 2023 for 950,000 francs (around $1.2 million), rather than pay monthly rent. It was a steal for a brand-new building in this neighborhood, where the average home price ranges from 1.9 million to 2.3 million francs ($2.3 million to $2.8 million), according to W\u00fcest Partner. When he sells it, he can only receive the purchase price plus inflation.<\/p>\n
To a large extent, the co-op\u2019s viability is due to Mr. Guidetti and his fellow cooperative founders\u2019 social vision. \u201cWe built the Bled to fight against real estate speculation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Although building the Bled would not have been possible without support from the city \u2014 and from the government financial institutions that provided low-interest loans \u2014 older co-ops in Switzerland are often much less reliant on the government.<\/p>\n
Mr. Waelti\u2019s co-op, the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Coop\u00e9rative d\u2019Habitation Lausanne, was established in 1920 and has ample assets in reserve. Its 101 buildings are valued at hundreds of millions of francs, which can be used as collateral for new projects. Two more apartment buildings are under construction.<\/p>\n
The cooperative has no obligation to continue to expand, but Mr. Waelti said it must as part of its mission.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur goal is to use our capital to buy more,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have a commitment to Swiss society to produce more housing that is cheaper than the market price.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few blocks from the shores of Lake Geneva, Claude Waelti shows a visitor his apartment in one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[30504,32371,197,32372,94,29652,32370,26814],"class_list":{"0":"post-58258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-lausanne","8":"tag-affordable-housing","9":"tag-cooperatives","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-lake-geneva-switzerland","12":"tag-lausanne","13":"tag-lausanne-switzerland","14":"tag-real-estate-and-housing-residential","15":"tag-renting-and-leasing-real-estate"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116494058545860172","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}