Taking housing off the market — permanently

The German Mietshäuser Syndikat (MHS) does not own buildings. It owns a veto. Each house-project is a limited liability company (GmbH) held jointly by the residents' association and the Syndikat itself. Any sale, or any change to the company's statutes, requires both shareholders to agree. The Syndikat, constitutionally, never will.

The legal innovation sounds bureaucratic. Its effect is radical: the building is functionally removed from the speculative market, in perpetuity. Residents pay rent calibrated to service the mortgage and maintenance. Once the mortgage is amortised, surplus rent flows into the Solidartransfer — a federated fund that seeds new projects. An MHS house, over its lifetime, buys the next MHS house.

The network began with a single Freiburg flat-share in 1992. As of 2025 it encompasses more than 200 member projects across Germany and Austria, housing several thousand people. It accepts projects regardless of political flavour, provided the legal architecture is respected and the Solidartransfer obligation is honoured.

For a directory evaluating housing co-ops, MHS is instructive because its cooperative claim is not self-attested. It is written into the share structure and the Grundbuch (land registry). The evidence is literally notarised. That is the highest tier of governance evidence a housing listing can offer.