COOPERATIVES

Housing cooperatives are resilient to people´s needs and the characteristics of permanent change in growing countries, including the ones that affect their internal democratic structure and their associative corporate activity.They have participated in professional associations of construction and cooperatives, in academe, and in dialogue between cooperatives and branches of state. Cooperatives have adapted to the use of instruments of public, financial, and social policies within cooperative principles in associative companies plus +R+D+I, listening and contributing knowledge acquired through experience with rational arguments.My analysis in this framework consists of three significant issues related to housing cooperatives in the current situation of local real estate: corporate innovation, updating cooperative democratic governance; rental of protected housing as an activity of service; saving of buyer members as core financing in the purchase of housing.This analysis should provoke an open discussion of the concept of housing as a public good financed partially or totally with state resources for its acquisition or construction. Housing should be considered a service.