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With the changes in the economy and traditional family structure organization, the issue of "living" is no longer just a residential real estate trading investment issue in the past with the economic takeoff and money flooding. In recent years, in addition to the traditional real estate trading and rental model, alternative living models of different sizes have gradually emerged. Large-scale social housing construction led by the public sector under the initiative of the Social Residential Alliance for many years; small-scale enterprises include the "co-living" that Jiulou tribe attempted to operate under the structure of the private rental market, or the Xizhou tribe developed from the issue of the urban aboriginal social movement, all of which are trying to break through in the real estate territory of Taiwan dominated by the private market economy and find more public forms of residence.
Residential Group: Starting from the spirit of squatting, institutionalizing the diversity of residential buildings
1960. In the 1970s, the first batch of "residential groups" (woongroep) appeared in the Netherlands and Denmark. The co-living form of residential groups is between commune and social housing. It is not like residents sharing everything in commune housing, and it is also not the same as that of ordinary social housing that is common in households. The members of the residential group are a group of individuals who are not in family relationships. Based on shared ideas, religion, community and even economic factors, they form a group that is consciously in the category of shared residence while maintaining individual independence. It can be a different independent portal that lives in the same building in groups, or you can share other spaces outside the personal living space.
Briefly distinguishes the differences between residential groups and cooperative housing, and there are more detailed differences in regulations.
htmlIn the 180s, with the rise of the squatting movement, many idle buildings in the city became "residential groups" through legal squatting operations, and then became legal living spaces through different channels. Some buildings are acquired by the government or social housing associations and are renovated and leased back to the originally occupied residential groups at an affordable price. The residential group is able to establish legal person organization , manage it on its own, decide on the eligibility for occupancy, and collect rent to pay to the property owner. This method allows cities to provide more affordable living space to citizens, and also solve the maintenance and management and criminal security problems caused by idle space. To this day, many idle schools, hospital buildings, industrial factories, churches, prisons and even cultural assets in major cities in the Netherlands are still used by men, women, young and old in the city in the form of residential groups.
was originally a school building and is now used by residential groups (Picture: Author)
is located in Rotterdam elderly residential group Orkide, with the appearance of it being the same as other residences. (Photo: Author) The residential form of
"residential group" not only exists in the historical squatting movement, but also has been used by different social groups since the 1990s, such as elderly homes with shared nursing facilities, mentally disabled care homes, and even individuals with different religious and cultural tendencies, can plan shared residential forms of different degrees in the form of residential groups. Taking Amsterdam as an example, urban housing prices and rents have soared in recent years. Since 2019, a group of young citizens have formed a residential cooperative legal person of ‘deNieuwe Meent’. They rented land from the municipal government with the social sustainable public concept of non-commercialization of residential properties and loaned to banks in the name of legal persons. Media architects and citizens who form residential groups jointly designed a composite collective residential property combining social housing, social welfare facilities, and residential groups.
National conditions are different, not excuses: Institutional innovation is the social accumulation that evolves with history
System is a systematic arrangement of social habits. Its generation and transformation take a long time to precipitate.Taiwanese readers often think that because of a very high proportion of social housing, they mistakenly believe that the Dutch social system is more socialist, and even more mistakenly directly believe that shared, cooperative, and socially shared housing is particularly prone to occur in the Netherlands. This view ignores the long-term evolution of the system, especially the reasons why historical events trigger the transformation.
In fact, the Netherlands' protection of private property rights and the development model based on property rights are in principle consistent with Taiwan. Housing and land use planning is mainly based on private sector development behavior. The public sector acts as goalkeepers. After conducting a normative review, it can agree to the development by sending a construction license (reviewing the building regulations, and whether it meets the land use specifications). Residentials are developed by the private sector (developers or individuals) or by the social residential association. The emergence of residential groups is not an inevitable result of institutional evolution, but institutional flexibility (Flexibility) accepts the result of squatting. This flexibility is not only a "project-oriented" legalized group squatting behavior, but also a formulation of new regulations to adapt to the emerging living model and accept groups that are not family (community) units, so that they can legally use, manage and maintain shared residences. Simply put, getting on the bus first (the large-scale urban squatting movement in the 1980s) and then replenishing the ticket (in response to new changes, the flexibility of the system) is the origin of the Dutch residential group housing system. Even if the house stake movement is no longer legal, the system can be used by other groups to create a diverse and inclusive residential space community according to different needs.
Diversity residential production can ensure that the needs of residents can be taken care of more properly. Even if you can't buy it on the market, you can find another way to DIY. At the same time, it can ensure that the residence is not only a commercial housing with a single style (because as a "good" commodity, it must be single style, unified specifications, and high liquidity), and space professionals such as transparent management, and architects can also play a greater professional role and help residents optimize their living space together; this move liberates architects from the professional ethical dilemma in designing commercial calculators).
Looking back at the system of collective residential production in Taiwan. If you hope to increase more flexibility and give more space to diversified residential production, you can talk about it from at least two methods, a total of three aspects:
1. Public idle space transformed into social housing
Even if the plan to build a large number of social housing cannot keep up with the changes, the government still holds a large number of public idle spaces. If these mosquito halls can transform the space into residential space through the permission of the system, just like the legalization procedures after squatting in the 1970s and 1980s in the Netherlands, it is effective in real time and at the same time solves the problems of affordable housing shortage and maintenance of idle properties. For example, cities in Taiwan have many innovation and entrepreneurship bases designed for idle space (imagination of innovative cities). In fact, compared with office space, innovative entrepreneurs need more funding and software support.
Another problem is that so many innovative entrepreneurs may also need an affordable residence. Combining the entrepreneurial space and living space, they will set up a residential group, and being a tenant and a property custodian will be a feasible direction. Or in the face of the elderly and the less-birth of birth, schools do not need so many school buildings. Whether these school buildings can be transformed into social housing is the government's property rights, but they are entrusted to residential groups and operated by various groups, and are responsible for their own profits and losses. Lin Zhoumin, former director of the Taipei Municipal Government, once proposed the EOD plan (Education-oriented development), which is also the idea of efficient and profit utilization of public land. We believe that it is the key to being able to cultivate residential groups with business capabilities. Otherwise, if the public sector does not have the energy to directly manage such a large number of social housing, residents' autonomy is the solution.
2. By legal person, a new cooperative residential building was built
In the past, the government assisted ethnic groups with specific needs in the name of social welfare to find affordable residential or activity space. For example, Xihaner Workshop entered the MRT joint opening house, which often caused other residents to rebound. Even if there are no other neighbors rebound, in terms of space use, it is an existing commodity standardization space, and it may not necessarily meet the needs of these specific groups. If there are relevant systems to assist groups with different needs to create space according to the needs of individual groups in the form of residential groups and obtain the use of residential houses with affordable rent, it will benefit many vulnerable groups that have no place to live. In this aspect, there are two challenges that need to be broken through:
A. The law to obtain land use rights
If you do not build your own land in Taiwan, you can only buy commercial housing or pre-sale houses built by the builder. The vast majority of the land supply is obtained through the market. The first thing to face when building a house in a collective is to obtain legal land. If you do not buy land in the market, then public land needs to have a Leasing mechanism (Leasing) that sets land rights to cooperative residential properties.
B. Bank Civil Construction Financing (Construction Loan) to obtain funds
Cooperative residential funds require a loan channel with special purpose. Because the existing bank civil construction financing and property valuation mechanisms are completely unsuitable for the application of cooperative residential buildings. Residential construction loans are subject to commodity liquidity. In case of bad debts , the collateral must be able to be cashed out and offset in the market. Therefore, the construction financing of cooperative residential construction with customized and collective property rights cannot be accepted by existing bank financing, and special loans are required for cooperative residential housing.
Xizhou tribe built a house as a reference. Can a special case be modified?
As mentioned earlier, the change of the system requires the opportunity of historical events. There are indeed cases in Taiwan, namely the Amei Xizhou tribe and the Three Gorges Sanying Tribe located in Xindian, , New Taipei City.
Xizhou tribes used to build houses by themselves, and residents had already had more than 40 years of experience in co-residential living, and they are also practitioners of cooperative housing (informal residences, or "illegal constructions"). They are not squatting houses, they occupy a piece of land: occupy a high-rise land on the river bank, and build a house collectively by building the Amei people. Because of the land occupied in Xingshui District and facing strong government demolition pressure for a long time, the government's original plan was to demolish the Xizhou tribe and relocate the urban indigenous people who had lived together for 40 years to the state house [1]. After years of negotiation, professional assistance and struggle, the Xizhou Tribe's cooperative residential model has created new breakthroughs in the seemingly impossible urban planning, land use and residential policy systems.
Xizhou Tribe (Source: wikicommons)
First, the tribe's reservation land was designated as the first urban aboriginal zone in Taiwan. The urban plan to use the urban plan to use the district. Through the guarantee of the Aboriginal Employment Development Fund, residents applied for a project loan from Taiwan Bank . In addition, the donation of charity entrepreneur Mr. Tong Zixian made the reconstruction of the new Xizhou Tribe on the original water bank. The new Xizhou tribe has all the characteristics of cooperative housing, all of which are the results of spending a long time in the system to coordinate negotiations with the public department and jointly find a way out within the system.
The most important thing is that residents establish legal person organizations, both landlords, tenants and managers of the land, and the property rights and trusts of the land use of the house are legally applied for renting and building photos with the State-owned Property Administration in the name of "tribal legal persons" [2], and public facilities such as road maintenance, street lights, and five major pipelines of the New Taipei City Government are connected to the community. There are also public buildings with ethnic clubs in the community.Under such a system, residents have the right to use the property, but cannot be disposal (sublease and resell or mortgage). This is the core spirit of cooperative housing, which is shared, managed and shared by the community.
Urban indigenous tribes that build houses by themselves are being practiced in the form of individual cases in Taiwan. By sorting out the institutional evolution of Dutch residential groups, we hope that the institutional breakthroughs made by urban indigenous tribes such as Xizhou and Sanying can create greater social influence and allow this system to be used by more social groups in need.
The evolution of the Dutch "residential groups" history to contemporary times, or examples of the Xizhou tribe in Taiwan, are important milestones in promoting residential justice. "Residence" is a social issue that also includes the public and private sectors. We believe that to break through the real estate market with a rigid framework, we need to liberate from the diverse imagination of residence and have different imaginations of residence, so that we can further promote liberation in the system.
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