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The city that built collective housing first
Copenhagen built collective housing earlier and more thoroughly than almost any other European capital. The modern cohousing movement was born here in the 1960s, and the cooperative flat is woven into the fabric of the inner city. Yet a city of 667,099 people that solved collective living long ago now faces the same affordability squeeze as everyone else. That contradiction is the story.
What makes Copenhagen distinctive is how its tenure mix is built. Start with the andelsbolig: because the Danish cooperative share behaves much like ownership, the census folds it in and counts 54% of households as owner-occupiers. Strip the cooperatives back out and they are 28% of dwellings in their own right, around 95,000 homes across roughly 4,200 cooperative associations, home to about 32% of Copenhageners. Add the non-profit almene boliger — a further 18.8%, some 60,500 flats — and the picture inverts the usual European one. Renting accounts for 46% of households, yet only roughly 27.2% of the stock is genuine private rental, a smaller slice than the cooperative and non-profit tiers carry between them.
Cooperative members effectively own their unit, so cooperatives are grouped with owner-occupiers in national statistics.
- Owners
- Owner-occupier26.0%
- Cooperative28.0%
- Renters
- Public & non-profit rental18.8%
- Private rental27.2%
Of the dwellings shown above, about 18.8% additionally carry an almene-bolig affordability rule — a regulatory layer that overlays the tenures rather than adding to them. In Copenhagen that layer sits almost entirely inside the public/non-profit slice itself, which is why the public and social-housing shares match: the almene sector is both a tenure and the city's main affordability covenant.
Social housing here is a sector, not a covenant bolted onto private blocks. The almene boliger make up about 18.8% of the city's dwellings, and the affordability rule sits almost entirely inside that sector. They are run as non-profit associations with tenant democracy, financed through the national Landsbyggefonden, and open in principle to everyone — eligibility for an almene flat is effectively universal, not means-tested. This is the layer that holds the bottom of the market in place.
Each tenure carries its own price, and the spread between them is the affordability story in miniature. The cheapest way to live in the city is an older cooperative, where the boligafgift runs around €8.50 per square metre. Non-profit almene rents sit near €12.50. The all-stock median is about €11.36, held down by the sheer size of the regulated sector. Step into the open market and a newly-let private contract asks around €24, while furnished, serviced lets reach €30.00 per square metre gross. So a new private lease costs roughly twice a cooperative one — the affordability gap, stated as a number.
- Cooperative
- All-stock median
- Public/municipal housing
- New contracts
- Furnished / serviced (gross)
Net-cold monthly rent per square metre by tier (furnished is gross, all-in). The cooperative boligafgift is the cheapest way to live in the city; a newly-let private contract runs at twice that, before the furnished segment adds a further premium.
Vacancy is a side-plot here rather than the headline, but it is worth reading carefully. Roughly 4,200 buildings stand empty, much of it inherited or unmodernised stock, putting the residential vacancy rate at about 5.23%; the rental-vacancy rate, by contrast, is a very tight 1.8%. The slack lies in offices instead — around 454,400 square metres sit vacant, about 8.2% of the office stock. Short-term letting does more damage to supply than any of this. Some 4,477 homes are estimated to run as full-time, entire-home short-term rentals, clustered in the historic core and the harbour districts — thinning the long-term market on exactly the streets most visitors walk.
What keeps the pressure on is a simple mismatch of inflow against output. Jobs, universities and the wider Øresund economy pull net inbound migration to near 36,500 moves a year, against which the city issues only about 3,000 housing permits a year. Crucially, the strain no longer stops at the poorest; it now reaches the middle. Owner prices have run far ahead of cooperative ones: in 2025 an owner-occupied square metre cost roughly twice a cooperative one, a divergence that the Danish financial supervisor warned could end in a sharp correction. The hardest edges are still real — the city counts around 1,700 homeless people and roughly 400 residential evictions a year — and a comparative EU study finds renters and the young bearing the heaviest cost burden across the continent.
Today Copenhagen is becoming a closed country for ordinary people, because it requires insanely much money to borrow for a home.
