Oakland Queer Housing Cooperative

We are the Oakland Queer Housing Cooperative, a community project dedicated to secure, long term, affordable housing for the queer community of Oakland and our queer descendants. We are pursuing incorporation as a limited equity housing cooperative before securing real estate in which we will build a home, and share in the effort of manifesting the vital spirit of community.

As of November 2024, we are recruiting organizers to take part in the incorporating and fundraising process towards creating this cooperative. Join us and be a an essential voice shaping the future of our community, and secure a reliable, stable place to live for yourself and our descendants that will resist displacement through the power of community and collective ownership. Form lifelong bonds through service to community.

We:

• ...are a handful of local queers who have experience living in cooperatives and in contributing to their governance
• ...believe that collective ownership is the path to truly secure housing.
• ...have experience with home loans and real estate purchase
• ...are working with local and national cooperative associations
• ...are seeking more voices to shape the direction of the organization, and more hands to help with the lift of the legal and financial process of securing community housing
• ...desperately miss the sense of belonging cooperatives provide

You:

• ...have the capacity to dedicate time and energy towards the logistical and social formation and funding of a cooperative nonprofit
• ...have an interest in forming radical connections to place and people, while securing long-term protections against displacement for our community
• ...don't need to have any money (the organization will secure funding collectively)
• ...don't need to have any existing experience with cooperative housing nor any legal or financial expertise
• ...understand that this process will likely take years, and don't expect housing immediately

We seek to form a nonprofit that will purchase and govern real-estate for housing, and do so within the framework established by cooperative associations past and present. We'll be scheduling many social and logistical events in the months to come to build consensus and momentum towards the formation of this organization, and we invite you to join us. If you'd like to be involved, please reach out at [email protected]