Belgrade

Serbia's cooperative vehicle is the stambena zadruga, the housing cooperative, governed by the 2015 Law on Cooperatives, which lets five people found one. The contemporary version is use-based rather than ownership-based. A member pays an entry deposit and then a monthly contribution covering loan repayment, running costs and utilities, while the cooperative keeps title to the building so no flat can be resold at a profit. Pametnija Zgrada, the model built on that logic, aims to hold those monthly costs at roughly two-thirds of the market average. It is the local answer to the Genossenschaftsanteil of German-speaking Europe, the share a member buys to join, without the century of balance sheet behind it.

Organisation in focus

Pametnija Zgrada (Smarter Building)

Belgrade's only incorporated housing cooperative, and the model the rest of the sector is built around.

Read more →

This is a revival, not an invention. Housing cooperatives grew out of Belgrade's savings-and-credit cooperatives in the second half of the nineteenth century. From the late 1960s to 1990 they built 5,000 to 8,000 flats and 10,000 to 15,000 family houses a year, about a third of everything built in the country in that period. The 1990s stripped away their privileged access to land and credit, and a 2004 change to value-added tax removed the relief they had enjoyed on construction materials. What survived was mostly the legal form, emptied of members and projects.

Today's sector divides into three groups that do not share a problem. A handful of legacy zadruge persist as small development companies with no pipeline of members. The single new project cooperative, Pametnija Zgrada, was incorporated in Belgrade in 2019. Its founders describe it as the first housing cooperative registered in the city in nearly twenty years. Its obstacle is finance, not demand. Organisational lending in the region runs to two or three years and is calibrated for developers building flats for sale. That does not fit a building repaid over decades. Third comes a civic research layer, Ko Gradi Grad and the Ministry of Space collective, which supplies the legal argument, the data and the advocacy the other two lack. Its work on what community participation actually delivers in cooperative housing is the subject of the RE-DWELL review of participatory practice in the sector.

Organisation in focus

Ko Gradi Grad (Who Builds the City)

The civic platform that developed the Smarter Building model and holds Serbia's seat in MOBA.

Read more →

From our library

Review of the participatory and community-based approach in the housing cooperative sector

What community participation actually delivers in the cooperative housing sector.

Read more →

What the cooperative idea has instead of a national framework is a regional one. MOBA Housing SCE, registered in 2020 as a European Cooperative Society, brings together members from Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Serbia and Slovenia, with Ko Gradi Grad carrying the Serbian seat. Corinna Hölzl's study of cooperative pioneers in Central and South-Eastern Europe traces MOBA's two financing instruments. The first is an accelerator fund, a revolving pilot that starts at €1 million and aims at €15 million. The second is a European ethical bank, now seeking a licence in Lithuania after Croatia refused one. Both exist because domestic policy offers cooperatives nothing. That absence is where Serbian housing politics begins.

The sitting government's answer to the housing crisis is a mortgage, not a building. A law passed in early 2025 lets Serbians aged 20 to 35 buy a first home with a deposit of 1% instead of the usual fifth. The state guarantees 40% of the loan for a decade and subsidises the interest for six years. First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Siniša Mali put the opening instalment on a €75,000 flat at €93 a month. Demand overran the design. The guarantee scheme opened at €400 million and was raised to €600 million in autumn 2025, then to €900 million in June 2026. By then 7,400 applications had been filed and roughly 4,400 loans approved.

The levers are stacked unevenly. Tenancy law, the guarantee scheme and the subsidy line all sit in Belgrade ministries. The Ministry of Finance runs the money. The Ministry of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure, under Aleksandra Sofronijević, holds planning and legalisation. Serbia's 2016 Law on Housing and Building Maintenance defines five categories of housing support and hands delivery to municipalities. That is where it thins out, as the four-country study of social housing systems records. The City of Belgrade allocates land and keeps the social-housing register. It sells non-profit flats to qualifying households at €450 per square metre before tax, but it does not build them any more. All of this is being argued over during a campaign. Prime Minister Đuro Macut asked the president to dissolve parliament on 7 September 2026, setting up a vote on 18 or 25 October. Protests over the Novi Sad railway-canopy collapse had run for nearly two years by then.

For cooperatives, the policy shelf is bare. There is no concept-led land tender of the kind German cities run, no ground-lease instrument, no federation pact and no dedicated credit line. When the draft national housing strategy went out for consultation, the Ministry of Space collective and the Housing Equality Movement filed formal objections. The document set out possibilities and initiatives where it needed targets. The consultation window had also been placed across the holidays. So the gap that Corinna Hölzl's work on translocal cooperative networks describes is not a funding gap alone. It is the absence of a counterpart on the public side.

From our library

Cooperative Housing Pioneers in Central and South- Eastern Europe: Mainstreaming Alternatives through Translocal Networks

Traces MOBA's accelerator fund and ethical-bank plans across five CSEE countries, Serbia included.

Read more →

On empty homes the state has chosen amnesty over penalty. Serbia levies no vacancy tax and keeps no empty-homes register, and with office vacancy in the low single digits there is no office glut to convert. What it does run is legalisation. Under the "Svoj na Svome" scheme, or Own Your Own, Sofronijević reported 2,500,000 applications against an estimated 2,300,000 unregistered buildings, and expects 800,000 to a million to be resolved within six months. Heritage protection has moved the other way. On 7 November 2025 parliament passed a special law stripping the bombed General Staff complex of its protected status. The site was to carry a $500 million hotel and apartment scheme by Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners. The developer walked away that December after weeks of protest.

Serbia is not an EU member, so the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive does not bind it directly. Its Energy Community treaty obligations still pull its building rules towards the European acquis, and the retrofit money is already moving. The Public ESCO programme is worth €64.5 million, of which €50 million comes from the EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It covers half the cost of renovating more than 500 district-heated residential buildings from the 1960s to the 1980s, chasing energy savings above 35%. That stock is New Belgrade's stock. Retrofitting it is the largest non-market housing intervention the city has running. It is being delivered through building associations rather than cooperatives, because cooperatives are not there to deliver it.

Belgrade's demonstrators are small, and that is the honest measure of where the city stands. What follows is one cooperative and the collectives around it. Then one municipal estate that shows what cost-rent needs and lacks. Then the two public programmes large enough to change the existing stock.

Pametnija Zgrada, the Smarter Building cooperative, is the proof of concept. Its members collectively develop, finance, own and run a single multi-apartment building, and the cooperative keeps title so no flat can be flipped. The founders make the case plainly: in Belgrade most people reach a home through inheritance or risky borrowing, and this is the third route. The years since incorporation have gone on land, credit and the tax treatment of a legal form the state stopped thinking about. It has also been presented as a prototype other Serbian cities could copy.

Ko Gradi Grad, Who Builds the City, is the platform the cooperative grew inside. It began in 2010 as an informal response to a development pattern marked by privatisation and thin public oversight, and registered as a citizens' association in January 2016. The Smarter Building model has been in development there since December 2012, pursued through legal advocacy and direct action rather than architecture competitions. Ko Gradi Grad also holds Serbia's seat in MOBA, which is how a single Belgrade project connects to a regional balance sheet.

The Ministry of Space collective, founded in 2011, supplies the evidence the sector argues from. It publishes affordability research on Belgrade and built the listings analysis that found only a small minority of advertised flats within reach of ordinary residents. It also files formal objections when planning documents and national strategies go out for consultation. Its work sits alongside Critical Mapping for Municipalist Movements, a 2019 to 2023 project that put Belgrade beside Barcelona and Berlin and handed housing campaigners feminist data-visualisation tools instead of another report. Belgrade appears in that comparison as the high-homeownership case, where the crisis runs through prices rather than through landlords.

From our library

CMMM

Critical mapping with housing campaigners in Belgrade, Barcelona and Berlin, 2019 to 2023.

Read more →

Kamendin, in Zemun Polje, is the cautionary case, and it belongs here because the lesson is transferable. The city built the estate and let its flats on cost-based rents, which track actual costs. With no rent pooling, no maintenance fund and no cooperative governance to absorb a shock, the bill kept climbing. Tenants who had qualified on low incomes ended up in arrears. Of the households now in dispute, 17 have been evicted or are awaiting enforcement. Violeta Filip, who chairs the Socio-Economic Council, told the public broadcaster RTS that plans to address the estate are still only an idea in its infancy.

The Public ESCO programme is the largest thing the state does to homes that already exist. The district-heated blocks it renovates add up to roughly 1 million square metres of floor area, at an average of €2,500 per flat. Maja Vukadinović, then Assistant Minister of Mining and Energy, framed it as lower bills and higher property values. For New Belgrade's towers it is also the only route by which the socialist-era stock gets a second life instead of a demolition argument.

The Belgrade Linear Park is the city's one large adaptive-reuse commitment. A 4.6 kilometre green corridor will cross 48 hectares of disused railway land, running from Beton Hala below the fortress to the Pančevački bridge. It is budgeted at €55 million and divided into ten themed sections. It converts infrastructure rather than buildings, and it sits on land that could have carried homes. That was the argument the Ministry of Space made when the detailed plan went to public inspection. Belgrade Waterfront, the Eagle Hills joint venture on the Sava, is the counter-model, and it is where the city's development capacity has actually gone.

Heinrich Böll Stiftung Belgrade is the convenor that keeps the argument funded. Its regional office has been in Belgrade since 2006 and was restructured in 2010 to cover Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro, working on urban development, ecological transformation and shared resources. Between the foundation's convening, the collectives' research, MOBA's regional finance and one incorporated cooperative, Belgrade has assembled every part of a cooperative housing sector except the building. A century ago the same city built thousands of flats a year this way. The next one it completes will be the first in twenty years, and the argument will move from whether the form works to how fast it can be repeated.

Organisation in focus

Heinrich Böll Stiftung Belgrade

The Belgrade regional office that convenes and funds the city's housing-policy debate.

Read more →