Córdoba

Spain's housing cooperatives come in two very different forms. The common one is the cooperativa de viviendas in ownership: members pool savings to build at cost, and each receives the deeds to a flat when the building is finished. The cooperative then usually dissolves. The rarer form is cesión de uso (grant of use), where the cooperative keeps the building for good and members hold an indefinite right to live there. They pay an entry contribution, refunded when they leave, and a monthly fee. Only the second keeps homes out of the market permanently.

Córdoba's cooperative history runs through its courtyards more than through any federation. The casas de vecinos were an informal commons long before the word cooperative arrived: shared wells, washing places and flowerpots, with rent paid to a single landlord. When the twentieth-century suburbs of Fuensanta, Sector Sur and Ciudad Jardín pulled families out of the crowded centre, many patio houses emptied. Developers demolished a large part of them during the building boom, and others fell into ruin as elderly tenants died. The city answered with conservation, not tenure reform. Its rehabilitations for social rent go back at least to the 1990s, with 18 VPO rental flats at Ronquillo Briceño 12.

Today's sector falls into three clusters. The first is the ownership model, which can deliver new VPO blocks and competes for the same scarce land as any developer. The second is a small grant-of-use movement born in the historic centre. PAX Patios de la Axerquía was started in 2018 by architects and anthropologists. Its founders describe it, in a paper for the Andalusian heritage institute's journal, as "a strategy for urban renewal of empty patio houses through cooperative processes", financed through ethical banking. COPATIO, a senior cohousing project run by the association La Tribu Educa, seeks the same model for older residents and won the council's backing in 2018. The third cluster is professional: Espacio Común, an Andalusian architects' cooperative, drafted the city's housing plan. The grant-of-use groups face problems the ownership model does not. They need buildings or land they cannot outbid tourists for, and loans that Spanish banks rarely write for a collective tenant.

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PAX Patios de la Axerquía: rehabilitación de casas-patio vacías a través de procesos cooperativos (revista PH, IAPH)

Cooperative‑led courtyard revitalisation blends heritage, ethical finance, and climate‑smart urban regeneration.

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The city has begun to name them. In February 2021 the council passed a unanimous motion on housing for older people asking VIMCORSA to treat grant-of-use cooperatives as being in the public interest and to reserve land for them. The Plan Municipal de Vivienda y Suelo 2024–2029 (the municipal housing and land plan) sets an explicit aim to favour "self-organised access to housing through cooperatives". It also lists support for cooperative, collaborative and self-built housing among its programmes. The new Andalusian housing law adds the tool that was missing: public land can now be granted to private groups for protected rental housing.

Córdoba's council, governed by the Partido Popular (PP, the centre-right party) with an absolute majority under mayor José María Bellido, has made building its answer. The housing plan approved on 9 May 2024 targets 2,144 protected homes, with €212 million of investment in new building. VIMCORSA alone plans 948 VPO homes, 759 for sale and 189 to rent. Plan Vives adds 600 small rental flats for young people on municipal land, with around €72 million fronted by VIMCORSA. Since June 2026 protected homes are allocated by lottery rather than by points. The mayor has also pledged that half of all homes in future developments will be protected, up from 30%.

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Vimcorsa denuncia que el Gobierno frena 174 VPO en Córdoba

Vimcorsa faces four‑year delays on 174 state‑land homes, despite a €142.9 million, 948‑unit plan.

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Each tier of government holds a different lever, and they rarely pull together. Madrid writes the tenancy framework. Its Ley 12/2023, the national housing-rights law, lets regions declare stressed markets and cap rents there, but the Junta de Andalucía (the regional government) has refused to declare any. The state funds, too: the Plan Estatal de Vivienda 2026–2030 carries €7,000 million, and SEPES, the state land company, became CASA47, a public housing developer, in December 2025. The Junta sets planning and subsidy rules. Its Ley 5/2025, the Andalusian housing law, passed with PP votes alone and took effect in January 2026, while Madrid disputes 16 of its articles. Since July 2026 housing has its own regional ministry under Rocío Díaz. The city holds land and VIMCORSA. The friction is visible on the ground: 174 of VIMCORSA's planned homes sit on former prison land held up by a transfer between two state companies.

Support for cooperatives is written into the rules more than into budgets. The Andalusian law lets councils grant surface rights, usufruct or grant of use on public land for protected rental housing, and lets cooperatives recruit members from the protected-housing register. The city plan has a cooperative objective but no dedicated land tender yet. No dedicated land tender for cooperatives has been announced so far.

The reply to empty space is conversion and a brake on tourism. Under the Junta's Decreto-ley 1/2025, an emergency housing decree, which aims at 20,000 protected homes in five years, Córdoba agreed in May 2025 to allow protected housing on plots zoned for offices or tourist lodging. A regional decree of 2024 lets councils cap tourist flats, and Córdoba used it: since April 2025 new tourist-flat licences are frozen for three years in the Centro and Sur districts. The Junta cancelled 106 registrations in the capital in the first five months of 2026. Critics point to a gap, as licences for tourist apartments, a separate category, neared 200 in 2026. The national law also allows a surcharge of up to 150% on the IBI property tax for long-empty homes; Córdoba has leaned on building instead.

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El número de pisos turísticos en Córdoba se reduce en tres meses de moratoria de nuevas licencias

Moratoria cuts tourist flats by 19, a 12.6% city‑centre share, sparking activist backlash.

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Heat makes retrofit a housing policy. AVRA, the Junta's housing agency, is renovating 586 public homes in 12 projects with EU regional funds. A map by the Córdoba architects' college found that 95% of homes need new windows. In the summer the council opens air-conditioned climate refuges. Compact rehabilitation of the historic centre, rather than new suburbs, is the lower-carbon path, and it is where cooperatives and VIMCORSA already work.

On the other side, tenant groups read the regional law as a law for builders. The mayor's case to the Senate is that faster land release will cool prices. Tenant organisers argue that without rent controls new supply will not reach those already squeezed.

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Bellido presenta en el Senado el modelo Córdoba como respuesta municipal a la crisis de la vivienda

Mayor unveils municipal housing plan, boosting VPO to 50% and curbing tourist rentals.

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The argument will be settled less in the Senate than in a handful of buildings already standing in the city.

PAX Patios de la Axerquía is the project Córdoba's housing debate keeps returning to. Its first house, Calle Montero 12, is an eighteenth-century casa de vecinos in the Axerquía, the old quarter east of the Mezquita, that once housed as many as 18 families. The six-family cooperative PAX-Astronautas bought it, rehabilitated it around its patio and moved in in May 2022. The programme won a Europa Nostra award that year. Its method is written for others to copy: find an empty patio house, form a cooperative, buy or lease the building, then finance it with ethical banks.

VIMCORSA's senior homes on Calle Don Rodrigo show the municipal version of the same idea. The 23 rental units in the Axerquía were paid for with €1,312,500 of EU urban-strategy funds and handed over in September 2024, with the stated aim of keeping residents in the old centre. On the edge of the city, the company's Sama Naharro complex for older tenants reached 268 units with its second phase.

Plan Vives carries the approach to the young. Its first building, at El Pretorio, holds 52 flats, and rents across the programme are expected to fall between €180 and €220 a month. The sites were municipal plots for public facilities, rezoned under the regional decree, so the programme doubles as a test of building homes on public land.

The retrofit at Plaza de la Corredera 43 works inside a listed building on the city's great arcaded square. AVRA is insulating 27 public rental flats with aerogel on the protected walls, cork outside where rules allow and new timber windows, for €627,499. Further out, the agency's works at Las Palmeras began on 286 homes in 2017, and it is cutting energy use in 76 flats in Moreras.

Huerta de Santa Isabel is where the new city is being drawn. The PAU O-4 sector can hold 3,663 homes, and its first 60 protected homes came from a land-for-flats swap with the Junta in 2025. VIMCORSA's next 231-home VPO block is planned on the same sector.

The Concurso de Patios, the city's courtyard competition since 1921, is the unlikely institution beneath all of this. The council now spends up to €300,000 a year on prizes and participation payments, and a patio only qualifies if the house is lived in. It also bought the patio house at Calle Trueque 4 to become an interpretation centre. A city that pays people to keep courtyards alive has the start of a housing policy for them too.