Cooperative housing in Central and Southeastern Europe

Countries in Central and Southeastern Europe share many housing challenges. Following the fall of communist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the region experienced a significant shift from widespread state provision of housing to mass privatisation. Today, social housing represents only a fraction of the overall housing market, and most is on the private market. Unfortunately, the housing on offer does not provide adequate affordable housing for a large majority of the population.

In response, a group of pioneering housing initiatives from Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Serbia, and Slovenia have joined together to develop ‘people-driven’ housing solutions to tackle;

• the lack of institutional, financial, and legislative frameworks for collective housing
• limited expertise regarding investment strategies for co-operative housing; and
• a lack of suitable financial products.

Together with allied organisations, they created MOBA Housing SCE (MOBA) was created to address these issues and boost co-operatives across the region to increase the availability of affordable and anti-speculative housing in Central and Southeastern Europe.

World Habitat is one of MOBA’s associate members and have provided both advisory and financial support through our global community-led-housing programme.

We have supported MOBA in the following areas:

• funding for a series of initial workshops that helped create and define MOBA Housing SCE
• ongoing strategic input around network development, roadmaps and action plans, funding mechanism and approaches

our MOBA-World Habitat Cooperative Housing Development Grant pilot programme enabled MOBA to channel grants to five community-led pilot housing projects (one in each of the 5 countries).

MOBA has been active in the following fields:

• collectively developing access to tailored financial resources for the network and its members’ pilot projects
• attracting and sharing skills, knowledge, specific expertise (relating to financial, legal, organisational aspects and housing cooperative models)
• challenging unsupportive legal frameworks, and influencing policy and practice; and
• raising visibility of their mission and attracting allies.

To find out more about MOBA download a copy of our 2021 Annual Report or catch up with all the latest CLH blogs.

MOBA is interested in connecting with other groups that aim to create co-operative housing pilot projects across Central and Southeastern Europe. For more information, contact info@moba.coop