Gotcha. I'm in Seattle and I see a lot being built here.

People want single family detached homes, not because they want to preserve their home value, but because they want to preserve their quality of life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's just not true. As long as you have a defined structure and responsibilities

And in addition to the mortgage there's usually a monthly condo/HOA fee to pay for upkeep of common areas and roofs etc

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 think 15 minute cities are solarpunk on an immediate timescale yes

“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

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.

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.

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.