Tbh I would hate to own a condo/townhouse/duplex. The idea of "owning" just part of a building while still having your property at the whims of whoever youre attached to... no thanks. Would much rather rent those spaces, pay more for less liability and to not be locked down to one location if you get lousy neighbors (which are a lot worse when you share a wall...).
I think they're not being built in most US (and maybe Canadian?) cities because nimbys only want single-family detached houses to be built to preserve their home's value
least that's what I've gathered from watching youtube videos on urban planning and reading articles
As an owner of one I now understand why they suck and would not buy one again unless it is part of a larger HOA. In a townhouse that is stand alone, it only takes one unit being a total fucking pissant to ruin the entire property. All the checks and balances break down with every vote and action being 50/50 with no tie breaker or third party sanity. Unless of course you want to hire a lawyer for everything.
Your good neighbor moves out and sells to some mouth breathers and everything spins wildly out of control.
Tax incentives and property values have made them less attractive for home builders. Meanwhile They're a waste of space and energy and people who live in townhomes and apartments rate as much happier than people living in detached homes
Why should you own the place you live in? Something like a housing cooperative is great. Also having single family housing in villages is fine. They are somewhat needed to run agricultural businesses and the like. Cities are great as a concentration of resources and talent lowers transport costs a lot and that makes everything more efficent. However they are mostly good at producing fresh produce and they can produce all they need realisticly. However we still need rural areas to produce other agricultural products.
Why should you own the place you live in? Something like a housing cooperative is great.
In housing cooperatives, don't the residents own the building jointly?
I think the original source specifies owning, not renting, because in American capitalism, if you don't own the place you live, the owner has a lot of power over you and a lot of ways to abuse that power. Renting sucks.
It depends on the cooperative, but the most common one, is that the cooperative owns the building and only residents can own shares. Those shares are only for sale to future residents and can only be bought and sold from and to the cooperative. Hence no free trading. Generally for older ones they tend to be rather cheap.
So yes the building is somewhat owned by the residents, but in many cases it is deliberatly turned into an awfull asset, which is unprofitable for the owners.
It sometimes feel like some people would rather force others to become homeowners than accept the fact that landlords (in any shape or form) might be necessary...
I'm not going to purchase a house if I know I don't have the means to maintain it or if I know I'm moving temporarily.
Even when buying a house, you usually have to take a massive loan. Those take years to be paid back. Especially when you have to take them, before you actually have a high income. After all young adults do not tend to have high incomes.
Housing cooperatives quickly turn into unmaintained garbage. When everyone owns something, nobody cares for it.
Own your own living space.
Research in Canada found that housing cooperatives had residents rate themselves as having the highest quality of life and housing satisfaction of any housing organization in the city.[8] Other research among older residents from the rural United States found that those living in housing cooperatives felt much safer, independent, satisfied with life, had more friends, had more privacy, were healthier and had things repaired faster.[9] Australian researchers found that cooperative housing built stronger social networks and support, as well as better relationships with neighbours compared to other forms of housing.[10] They cost 14% less for residents and had lower rates of debt and vacancy. Other US research has found that housing cooperatives tended to have higher rates of building quality, building safety, feelings of security among residents, lower crime rates, stable access to housing and significantly lower costs compared to conventional housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Research_on_housing_cooperatives
The residents own the building indirectly. That means all of them look out for it. Unlike a commercial rent, the people who own it also live in it, which means they actually care about the quality. The cooperative has an actual structure to organize repairs, upkeep of shared spaces like floors and a way to collect money to pay for those. A private residence especially the later part can be a problem. Not having the money to pay for repairs or upgrades is rather common, especially for the retired.
Social studies are worth fuck all. This kind of research is pointless and has barely if any basis in reality.
In other words: Hey I just ignore all evidence, which goes against my opinion. I am sure the researches bribed the police to bring down crime statistics and also building inspectors to evaluate the building quality. Also all of them people living in them have to be liars.
Please spread it. Given how quickly cooperative housing is being run down, I honestly do not have a problem living in something built 150years ago, being turned into ruins like this one in Amsterdam(btw it is easy to find similar old ones in other countries):
)
For each pretty picture you nitpick, there's dozens that look like post soviet piles of rubble and garbage barely held together by thinned down plaster and lead paint.
Social 'studies' ignore all kind of evidence as well.
Not all decommodified / cooperatively owned housing needs to be the sort of social housing that tend to come to mind when thinking of a "housing co-op."
Check out the work that the Beverly Vermont Community Land Trust is doing in Los Angeles: https://laecovillage.org/community-land-trust/. The "eco village" operates in this more crunchy, housing co-op sort of way, but then there are also lots of tenants and home-owners alike who live on the land owned by the land trust, without owning their homes in the standard sense.
afaik it's essentially an apartment but you own your domicile, and have a stake in the building as a whole along with the other "tenants" who are also co-owners.
•
And in addition to the mortgage there's usually a monthly condo/HOA fee to pay for upkeep of common areas and roofs etc
An apartment is a structural classification (one of many separate dwellings within the same building, usually flats); a condo is a legal classification for how ownership of a dwelling works (collective ownership of parts of a property, individual ownership of other parts). If a home is both, it's usually referred to as a condo, so "apartment" usually implies that it's rented.
That's an odd distinction to make isn't it? I've only ever heard people refer to apartments as condos or vice versa. Nobody would ever call a townhouse a condo even though I think you're saying they could/should?
I live in a townhouse that's also a condo, and call it one or the other depending on the context. Structurally it's a townhouse, legally it's a condo.
So. The oversimplification is you own a condo and you rent an apartment, however, you'll also run into definitions about where the front door gets you. Think of the difference between a motel and a hotel. With an apartment there's a hallway that you enter through one door, and then enter your apartment through a door along that hallway. A condo, there will be an open air coveted stairwell that your door will be accessed from. Which is another layer of oversimplification since in a lot of old developments you'll have a bottom floor commercial property and an upper floor apartment accessed from an open air door at ground level with a set of stairs reaching the apartment (imagine bobs burgers).
Point is. From living conditions perspective, they're very similar. The important thing is ownership models and that's the thing you should be looking into. You can rent a condo, you can own an apartment. It all just depends on local laws and definitions
Solarpunk is when affordable housing is near a garden and some stores, apparently.
Are the water and power for this community provided by a sustainable source that does not deplete the surrounding environment?
Is the community itself integrated into nature as much as possible, as opposed to disrupting it?
Is it capable of providing locally sourced food for its inhabitants? Does it support eco-friendly forms of personal transportation and utilize eco-friendly public transit as much as possible? Is this a utopian/post-dystopian society with advanced technology and a post-capitalist, communal social and economic paradigm?
....Does it even involve solar power?
Who knows!
15 minute city? No, no, that's solarpunk.
I don't doubt the cryptofash claims but I don't get it either. When I asked I was told that it was because the cottage is on stolen land, but aren't apartments?
I mean, that's part of it. Cottagecore (in the US) isn't just about living on stolen land, it's valorizing the settler culture that stole that land in the first place - a culture based on not just land theft but unpaid female labor, unpaid child labor, patriarchy, theocracy, slavery/servitude, and a whole host of other moral cultural toxins. Hopefully you can see the problem with living like an antebellum Southern plantation owner and calling it "plantationcore" while ignoring the whole, you know, slavery thing? Same principle.
Thing is, cottagecore as an aesthetic is just fine. Fill your mason jars with beans from your garden, knit yourself a lace tablecloth, draw little mushrooms on your wall, follow your bliss. The problem is where influencers take moral and cultural lessons from settler culture and are like "wouldn't it be wonderful if we all followed the old traditional ways and raised our children on books instead of screens and let them play outside in the fields with other kids and walked to the local market and farmed our own food and studied the Bible at night and lived in ethnically homogeneous communities and had the right to shoot migrants as trespassers". Because far right ideologues and traditionalists and so on love the idea of returning to the traditional life ways and traditional values of white American settlers and they use the aesthetic as a selling point in the same way that solarpunks use green aesthetic as a gateway drug to anti-capitalism.
Also, there is the issue of economic justice. How many people can afford a little cottage and an acre of land to farm? How many people can afford the time to do that traditional labor without worrying about earning money? Cottagecore influencers are mostly rich people playacting at an idealized version of poverty, which is classist and frankly insulting.
And a bunch of other stuff but this rant is long enough already.
“wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all raised our children on books instead of screens and let them play outside in the fields with other kids and walked to the local market and farmed our own food"
yes. as an educator, let me repeat--yes. these are good things that are children would benefit from. doing the weird, rhetorical strategy of implying these ideas (or the people advocating for them) slide seamlessly into racism is just...weird. like, you can dislike cottagecore while also accepting that it wasn't..."cryptofacist propaganda"
a few years back when i was more online, i was in a few cottagecore kind of spaces. they tended to be dominated by queer women and there was nothing particularly conservative or propagandistic about it. to me at least, it seemed to come organically from women who wanted to uplift things that were seen as outdated or stiffing or gender-stereotyped (threadwork, baking, gardening, etc.) as solutions to artificial and consumerist life. why buy fast fashion when you could thrift, mend, or make? why buy processed food from megacorps when you could grow your own ingredients and make food yourself? etc. and yeah, a lot of them were taking inspiration from the old american transcendentalists and brittish romantics, which you could say are colonialist, etc., but nothing is without fault and generally there are a lot of beautiful ideas from that era that can be taken into and discussed in the modern day, as we navigate tensions between technology and pastoralism (the machine in the garden, by leo marx, is an interesting bit of lit crit on this if you're into that kind of thing). i'd say too that a lot of them were community minded, either through advocacy groups, spirituality (witches and theists alike), community gardens, etc.
maybe the vibes have shifted in the years since, as i feel like the "tradwife" has become a thing on tiktok. but like...the people i know irl who are cottagecorey aren't on tiktok? they're reading and spending time outside and crafting things. so if you're getting the "cryptofacist propaganda" angle from that kind of thing, then I think we're talking about two discreet movements that just have some aesthetic overlap. influencers are never gonna be authentic representations of any kind of group, but most of the cottagecore people i've known irl haven't been rich in the slightest, they've actually mostly been retail workers or biology or lit grad students lol.
but ultimately...it would be wonderful if we were raising our kids on books instead of screens. anyone working in education can tell you that. and yeah, playing outside is good, actually. having a garden is also awesome, and being able to walk to the local market is doubly so. and the awesome part is, all those things can be done in the city, or the suburbs, or in rural america. they can be done in diverse communities built on compassion.
anyway, there are a lot of good things to be drawn from that whole subculture, imo
I agree with you that there is a big difference between "cottagecore" the online movement - which I believe is full of cryptofascist poison - and ordinary people who live similar lifestyles within their own communities and have nothing to do with fascism.
I both agree and disagree that there's not a seamless slide from cottagecore aesthetic to racism. I agree, because there's not necessarily a direct link between storing beans in mason jars and living in a militia camp in Montana preparing for the racial holy war. I disagree, because online cottagecore influencers are deliberately using those beans in mason jars in order to recruit new racists.
Cryptofascist cottagecore influencers start with unobjectionable good like "limit screentime" and "let kids play outside" and "consume less, reuse more". Then they incorporate more of their "traditionalist" moral and social values into their work. Then they follow/share/point their viewers at other influencers and sources, who are a bit more traditionalist, a bit more religious, a bit more aggressively opposed to modern society, a bit more mask off. And those influencers point their viewers at even more aggressively conservative sources. And so on and so forth. And ultimately you're watching videos about tradwives churning their own butter and talking about how liberals want to ban raw milk and how lactose tolerance helped white Europeans conquer the world.
That's why cottagecore is cryptofascist instead of mask off fascism. Because a lot of cottagecore content is positive and unobjectionable but it's being used to build an audience of people who dislike modern society and technology in order to indoctrinate that audience into fascism.
See also Jordan Peterson, who starts with "clean your room and make a schedule" and ends up with "men sexually assault women because of feminism".
So you say raising kids off screens and so on is good. And of course it is. Because if there weren't good and appealing aspects to the cottagecore subculture, crypto-fascists would be recruiting in different subcultures and we wouldn't be having this conversation 😆
(And in passing, everything I just ranted about applies to the actual fascists in the online community. The fact that cottagecore presents an idealized version of 19th century American settler colonialism, so is, let's say, problematic from the start, is not necessarily related to fascism but is still a concern that the movement mostly ignores. But then, homesteading and back to the land movements in the United States mostly have the same problems.)
I do think the meat of cottagecore is people knitting and creating stuff, and trying to have a simpler life. Trying to put a philosophy around it is probably not fundamental to that community.
This explains a lot, thanks. My only exposure to cottagecore is as a hashtag on aesthetic photos that pretty much look like my broke country friends' houses, it sounds like there's a lot more to it and an insidious set of values underneath.
I didn't actually know aesthetics had influencers, turns out that I know even less about this than I thought.
It's the difference between people living a lifeway in their own community and people outside that community selling an idealized version of that lifeway.
Your broke country friends aren't fascists or colonialists for living the way they live. The rich white influencers selling poverty chic? I look at them a lot more suspiciously.
It's the "back to the good old simpler times" trope, where the "good old times" never actually existed and are only a mix of nostalgia and active political manipulation by conservatives or worse.
I see, thanks. I always thought of rustic aesthetics as a practical thing— like you only have access to thrift finds and grandma's hand-me-downs, but you still want to tie it together into something beautiful. What I've gathered from this thread is that it's been spun into more rich racist bullshit.
What I’ve gathered from this thread is that it’s been spun into more rich racist bullshit.
i do think this is a mischaracterization that some people are pushing because it's easy, though fundamentally untrue. imo, most of the people who originally cultivated and belonged to the idea were women (a lot of them queer) who were looking for way to find authenticity in a very artificial and consumerist world. it was people thrifting and gardening and baking, etc. i'm thinking back to tumblr like ten years ago when it was actually relevant and that's what i can remember of it at least, that and a whole bunch of moodboards with pretty art and landscapes lol
but obviously, any time there's money to be made, monied interests are going to come along and try to co-opt something. it's why any hobby space is now filled with people posting about all the crap they buy for their hobby, instead of actually doing it. anyway, like i wrote in a much longer comment (which tbh feels like a futile use of time, as i forgot how fruitless arguing an idea on the internet actually is/feels), i don't think it's worthy of disdain, etc.
While I also find the blanket "cryptofascist" moniker a bit oversimplifying, cottage-core as an online phenomenon seems to lack a lets call it "natural immune response" to far-right people infiltrating their spaces and and appropriating the aesthetics. The Esoterics community (in Europe at least) has a very similar problem with right-wing people infiltrating online and offline communities via vaccine skepticism and then slowly move things towards the "sovereign citizen" movement or similar.
If I would draw a parallel to Solarpunk, it would be corporate green-washing attempts, which are happening, but the same time are widely discussed and actively fought against.
Maybe it lies in the very nature of the people typically drawn to Cottagecore and similar ideas, but I have not seen much of an similar active rejection of right-wing appropriation attempts, but rather some people retreating into their private spaces. Ultimately this has lead to the cottagecore to tradwife propaganda pipeline that sadly seems to exist these days.