The Future of Housing

How a housing cooperative in Amsterdam navigates old economic thinking

This blog is based on an interview with Diana Vernooij. Nederlandse vertaling hier.

Photo: Vereniging Wooncoöperatie Stroom

 

Diana Vernooij prefers not to call herself an entrepreneur. As a philosophy graduate who has managed a homeless shelter, worked as a civil servant in urban planning, and spent eight years active in the squatting movement, she sees herself more as a connective changemaker.

Yet, over the past few years she has done exactly what a Future Entrepreneur, in my view, does: bring a group of people together to create impact, with a business model in which value is shared fairly.

Diana is a member of Wooncoöperatie Stroom, a housing association in Amsterdam building its own intergenerational housing community. The cooperative's goal: taking housing out of the market. Diana envisions a world where homes are built "for real need, not for the craving for money and luxury."

 

Photo: Patrick Post. Trouw.

 

Housing in the New Economy

This goal counters how the housing market currently works. In our current capitalist system, a home is above all an asset: something that must generate returns for whoever owns, develops, or finances it. Rents and sale prices rise along with property values, without any improvement in the quality of living. The added value flows mainly to those who already own capital, while those who don't are pushed further out.

Housing cooperatives reverse that. It's not an investor who profits from the rise in your home's value, but an association of residents that owns the building and the residents themselves rent from that association. Rent doesn't rise with the market, and any profit flows back into the community, or to the next cooperative that needs help getting off the ground. At its core, this is a wellbeing economy: steering toward the wellbeing of people and planet, rather than toward maximum return.

That kind of shift doesn't happen all at once. The old system eventually has to compost before the wellbeing economy becomes the new norm, and until then you're in a messy transition, building the new while still deeply entangled with the old. The two-loop model by Wheatley and Frieze (Berkana Institute) captures this well.

Diana and her cooperative sit right at that intersection: they have to speak the language of the old system - winning tenders, taking out bank loans, meeting municipal requirements - while building something entirely different. That is precisely the role of the pioneer: already living by the logic of the new system while the old one is still dominant.

The story of Stroom shows what that looks like in practice: a series of concrete, sometimes frustrating frictions between an old and a new way of creating value. In this piece I'll walk you through a few of those clashes, and end with tips for navigating this transition as a Future Entrepreneur.

 

Clash 1: Shifting logics

The first thing that stands out in conversation with Diana is how often she and her community have to switch between two ways of operating that don't easily coexist. The municipality, for instance, asks housing cooperatives to collaborate: share knowledge, help each other, comply with subsidy conditions. But the moment a plot becomes available, the municipality switches roles and it becomes a tender: different cooperatives each submit their own plan, and only one is declared the winner.

Diana explains: "It's incredibly demoralizing to put your whole heart - and your money - into something, and then not get the chance because it's awarded to someone else." She's said as much to the municipality directly: "Guys, you need to choose - either we collaborate, or we negotiate."

This is exactly the kind of in-between space Future Entrepreneurs run into: a zone where the rules of the old economy (scarcity, competition, the best bid wins) and those of the new economy (collaboration, shared ownership, equality) don't automatically align. The two logics alternate, sometimes within the same conversation.

An informal, exploratory, experimental practice (the new economy) can suddenly be judged by the logic of contracts and guarantees (the old economy). Stroom, for example, had stated in their plan the ambition to build fully climate-neutral. It later turned out that, because of the shape of the plot - a corner lot, elevation differences, less roof surface for solar panels — 100% energy-neutral simply wasn't achievable.

When they reported this to the municipality, they were told they were now obligated to deliver energy-neutral housing. Diana: "As a bunch of well-meaning volunteers with ideals, we suddenly got handed a bill for our own good intentions - we were treated as professionals, like: 'You promised something.'" The result: the entire plan had to be rewritten and reassessed, costing them time, money, and energy.

Anyone operating in that in-between space has to constantly switch between different systemic hats and rulebooks. That takes time and energy you'd rather spend on your actual initiative.

 

Clash 2: Out-of-the-box

The second clash runs deeper, embedded in the laws and regulations themselves. Financing, subsidies, and mortgage rules are built for two categories: private individuals, or profit-driven businesses. A non-profit association falls between the two - out-of-the-box - and as a result systematically gets the disadvantages of both worlds, never the advantages.

A private individual gets mortgage interest relief and a more generous loan; a business is expected to make profit and gets a different rulebook accordingly. Stroom is neither, and the bank initially wanted to provide only 60% of the mortgage - far too little, while the remaining 40% couldn't be covered through private loans from people who simply wanted a place to live. Fortunately, the City of Amsterdam also provided a substantial 20% loan, but even that wasn't nearly enough.

Because institutions themselves aren't quite sure how to handle such an unfamiliar category, this sometimes creates internal disagreement too.

Several major Dutch banks initially wanted nothing to do with housing cooperatives. Eventually, Stroom found a bank willing to revive the cooperative idea, and Amsterdam's cooperatives even received a grant from them. But at the very moment the construction contract was to be signed, that same bank suddenly imposed stricter conditions, out of risk aversion.

So even within partner organizations, there's uncertainty about how to treat a party that doesn't fit the existing boxes.

 

Clash 3: Bigger isn't always better

Another insight from Diana concerns scale. How big can something grow before you lose the connection between people?

Diana talks about a housing initiative where half the apartments were meant for young people from Amsterdam and half for young ‘statushouders’ (refugees with residency permits). At one location with around 150 residents, violence and disturbances broke out, and the housing association involved decided to pull out. At another, much smaller location elsewhere in the same city, things went well. News coverage pointed to differences between the groups - young people versus statushouders - as the problem.

According to Diana, it's not about differences between people but about scale. Beyond a certain size, anonymity sets in, and with it disappears exactly the mechanism that self-governance depends on: knowing each other, holding each other accountable, seeing each other.

This aligns with anthropological research by Dunbar (1992), which shows that beyond a limit of roughly 150 stable relationships, people simply can't keep track of who belongs and how that person relates to everyone else - coincidentally, the exact number at which the project mentioned above broke down.

That's why Diana deliberately chose not to join a cooperative of 130 apartments, precisely because she wants to be able to ask: "Who are you? Are you related to so-and-so?" As she puts it: "It has to feel like home."

Understandably, from an efficiency standpoint, the municipality tends to push for larger numbers. But scale isn't neutral: it changes what kind of organization you can be. Diana's experience also fits well with the classic research on self-governance of common resources: self-governance works best within clear, manageable group boundaries, with direct mutual involvement among members (Ostrom, 1990). The moment you break through that scale to meet external efficiency standards, you risk destroying the very mechanism the added value comes from.

Photo: Vereniging Wooncoöperatie Stroom

 

A law that brings the New Economy a step closer

This summer, movement finally came on exactly these bottlenecks: an unclear legal definition, difficult financing, hesitant municipalities.

At the end of June 2026, the Dutch House of Representatives passed the Wet “bevordering wooncoöperaties” (Act to Promote Housing Cooperatives), a private member's bill by SP MP Sandra Beckerman in collaboration with Coöplink, an association of and for housing cooperatives in the Netherlands. The law does three things that directly address what Stroom has been running into for years: it finally gives the housing cooperative a broad, unambiguous definition in the Housing Act (with a distinction between the management housing cooperative, where residents self-manage but a housing corporation remains the owner, and the property housing cooperative, where residents develop and own the property themselves — exactly Stroom's model); it encourages municipalities to explicitly include housing cooperatives in their housing policy instead of deciding ad hoc per plot; and it comes with a new national Fonds Coöperatief Wonen (Cooperative Housing Fund), with over €60 million available from late 2026 to help cover development costs alongside bank loans and residents' own contributions.

This is the kind of structural change that Platform Wooncoöperaties Amsterdam and the Coöplink knowledge network have been pushing for for years. It doesn't solve the housing crisis overnight - the law itself acknowledges that housing cooperatives are no short-term miracle cure - but it's a first, concrete step toward easing the transition.

 

Practical tips: how do you navigate the transition yourself?

Diana's story is hopefully instructive for anyone trying to build between an old and a new way of organizing - whether that's a housing cooperative, a cooperative business, or another initiative with a social purpose. A few things that emerged from this conversation:

1. Look for people who can already bridge the gap. Don't see civil servants or bank employees as opponents - some of them are already working internally on behalf of your kind of initiative. Recognize them, and build that relationship just as seriously as you would within your "own" group.
2. Be explicit about which role you're being asked to play at any given moment. If an institution asks you to "collaborate" one moment and "negotiate" the next, name how this creates an unfair situation. Collaborating means laying your cards on the table; negotiating means you don't. If you're forced to negotiate after you've already shown all your cards, you're in a weakened position. Discuss this dynamic at the start of the relationship.
3. Keep scale deliberately small, even when efficiency arguments push for bigger. Something that works for twenty people doesn't automatically work for a hundred and fifty. If a subsidy or permit condition forces you into a scale that undermines your self-governance, that's a conversation worth having - even when it's uncomfortable.
4. Build your own knowledge of the rules of the game. Make sure someone in your group knows (or bring in a trusted expert who knows) how mortgages, subsidies, and legal structures work for your specific category, so you know in advance where you're structurally disadvantaged instead of discovering it after the fact.
5. Be patient without becoming passive. Diana's underlying attitude - trusting the long process without writing off the civil servants - may be the most underrated skill in this work. Frustration is justified, but cynicism shuts the transition down rather than opening it up. This fits well with the motto of Future Entrepreneur: Be hard on the system, soft on the individual person.

Diana put it perfectly herself, at the end of our conversation: "I always see myself standing a little on the edge of one thing and the other." That may be the best definition of what it means to live in the transition phase: not fully on one side, not fully on the other, but exactly where the friction is. And where there's friction, there's also movement.