Speaker
Description
This paper explores the dynamics of residential collective sales - where neighbours come together to sell their properties. Residential collective sales are driven by changes to planning frameworks that increase dwelling densities, often surrounding new transport infrastructure. This process has potential benefits for both urban development interests and property owners. On the one hand, collective sales are vital to delivering urban change and increased density, as development actors purchase a single, consolidated plot of land, rather than having to consolidate land through individual property purchases. One the other hand, owners can benefit from increases in property values due to upzoning and the capacity to negotiate higher sales prices as a collective. However, resident collective sales are fluid, fragile, and prone to breakdown.
Once the process is initiated, those ‘assembled’ are involved in a complex forward relationship with their property rights, home, neighbours and neighbourhood. This relationship requires the negotiation of those interests that remain ‘individual’, and those where cooperation and a shared understanding and goal need to be managed. The challenge of ‘holdouts’ and ‘free riders’ can be seen. For some, formalisation of an agreement to cooperate, for example through Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) or deeds of agreement can be seen; for others, those mechanisms are less clear. Individual/collective tensions also need to be steered through changing policy, market and development cycles: households’ property decisions become inveigled with the intricacies and politics of the planning system, legal interests, development finance, and the twists and turns of the housing market.
This paper shares insight from these individual/collective journeys drawn from case studies in Sydney, Australia, and Vancouver, Canada. As part of that journey, neighbourly relations evolve and are tested, groups may disband, regroup, split or ‘poach’, and optimism waxes and wanes. Tensions amongst neighbours play out which may lead to feuds and neighbours not talking to each other. Questions of trust and transparency come into play, as do pragmatism, resignation and fatigue.
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
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