The Hammer Housing Collective

Canada is facing an out of control housing crisis. In our city of Hamilton, ON., the average price of a single-family detached home has risen to 447% since 2000, and now sits at a totally unaffordable average price of $817,283. How can young working class folks ever expect to break into a market like this? Suburban sprawl is a huge part of this problem. That sort of construction is much more expensive to develop and maintain, and it uses land much less efficiently than more dense housing options. Our municipalities have prioritized suburban sprawl despite this, often due to backdoor deals with shady constructors. The supply of detached single-family homes cannot meet the demand, but more efficiently constructed housing can. For example, right now in our city there is an apartment building with 9 units of housing for sale for $2.15 million. If that cost was divided across 9 households occupying those units, that would come to a cost per unit of $238,888. For comparison, the average price of a condo in our city is $464,098, plus condo fees. That $2.15 million isn’t even a notably cost effective example, the deal really is just that much better when housing is bought in bulk, and it typically gets better as the buildings scale in size. This is the heart of our housing alternative. We have a plan to win a better housing deal as a group than we ever could as isolated individuals or families. We can reduce our housing costs drastically by buying a large multi-unit building and managing it as a community. However, what we envision is about more than just saving money on housing; we want to live in a community where neighbors are friends you can count on, rather than strangers. Shared resources, shared skills, shared tools and equipment, group events, collaborative projects, and collective decision-making all lower the burdens of life on each individual household, and we dare to say make life more pro-social, meaningful, and fun. Giving into the housing status quo right now would be allowing ourselves to be divided and exploited into giving up decades of extra labor, all just to live in an extra-separate box. We’ve done the math, you can expect to spend 340% fewer hours of your life working to pay off your mortgage using our model than a typical home mortgage. You don’t need a million dollars to own your own home, but it could easily cost more than that if you try to do it alone. It’s time for an alternative to living atomized from one another. We can secure better, healthier, and freer lives for us all by working and building in cooperation. Let’s do it.