Management and Maintenance
Following on from the session that unpacked the social housing model specifically, this session asked residents to think about how they would like to see the long term future of their collective home in terms of who should do the management and maintenance.
Using the roles of a social housing institution, we broke down the roles and responsibility involved in managing and maintaining a building like CGH and calculated that it could cost around half a million rand per month to fulfil all the functions needed to keep the place safe, clean, well maintained and working well.
Based on this understanding of what this entails, we discussed where residents wanted to see the long term future of CGH on the spectrum from full resident control of management and maintenance (which includes taking on all the responsibility and costs involved in this) to a mixed model which includes residents and an institution working together on management and maintenance to institutional control (where residents lose some power to influence their collective home but also do not have to worry about the work and cost of doing all the management and maintenance).
After a debate between the residents on how much power and responsibility they want to see residents have in the long term, of the 14 residents in the workshop, 12 voted for full resident control and 2 voted for institutional control (no one voted for mixed control). The 4 non-residents in the workshop also voted for full resident control.
The residents discussed the need to explore ideas of raising money to fund resident control of CGH. Ideas included collective savings, time banking, money making uses within the occupation and a proposal to lease the land from the City. These ideas will be explored in future workshops.
What other rental options…