Košice

The Slovak form is the bytové družstvo, a housing cooperative that owns the building while each member holds a členský podiel (a member's share that carries the right to use one flat). Under socialism the stavebné bytové družstvo (construction housing cooperative) raised the blocks with state loans, and members paid for their flat in instalments. Today's revived version works the same way with market money. A member pays an entry contribution, the cooperative takes the bank loan, and the member repays it monthly until the flat can pass into personal ownership.

The model grew with the steelworks. Act 27/1959 on cooperative housing construction made building cooperatives a main route to a new flat in Czechoslovakia. In Košice they grew up alongside the ironworks estates. The 1993 ownership law then let members convert their cooperative right into a deed, and nearly all of them did. The cooperatives survived as managers rather than landlords. Their census footprint in the city shrank to roughly 100 flats.

Two very different groups now carry the name. The first are the legacy building cooperatives that still run heating, repairs and renovation for the panel blocks their former members own. Their problems are ageing buildings and energy retrofits. The second is new and developer-led. KOSMALT, which came to market on the Terasa estate in 2026, is the first project in the city sold through a cooperative. Entry starts at €26,170 with monthly payments from €410. National developers such as Penta and YIT are reviving the same model elsewhere in Slovakia, and the risks are financial. Marián Búlik of the adviser OVB Allfinanz has calculated that a member on a €252,000 flat saves about €40 a month but overpays by €95,000 over a 40-year term. The entry deposit is also unprotected if the cooperative fails.

Lighthouse project

KOSMALT

Košice's first cooperative-finance housing, in a converted 1960s ironworks hostel on Terasa.

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Neither group is a non-profit landlord of the Austrian or Czech kind. The state has not written cooperatives into its rental push, which runs through investor-owned buildings instead. The Institute of Martin Filko argues that non-profit projects and cooperatives suit some households, but for now that is advice to government rather than policy. Košice's own answer to the housing question has gone another way.

National housing policy rests on one law. Act 222/2022 on state support for rental housing created the Agentúra štátom podporovaného nájomného bývania (AŠPNB, the Agency for State-Supported Rental Housing). Private investors build or buy blocks, keep them, and let them at rents tied to the regional average wage. In return they pay a reduced 5% VAT rate. The previous government signed its first two partners, Kooperativa of the Vienna Insurance Group and WBG, in 2022 and set a goal of at least 100,000 new rental flats. Prime Minister Robert Fico has kept the scheme and added an employer contribution of up to €360 a month per tenant.

Košice turned that national framework into a municipal deal. It is the first city to put its own land into the scheme. In April 2025 councillors approved a joint venture with WBG, part of the Austrian non-profit BWSG group, in which the city holds 15% and the investor the rest. The plan is for about 5,400 flats and €1.3 billion over ten years on 11 sites. Leases turn indefinite after five years, and tenants must live permanently in the city. Mayor Jaroslav Polaček, an independent, links the programme directly to a promise made to Volvo. The Archdiocese of Košice is adding land at Valaliky for about 2,200 more flats near the plant.

The levels of government split the work. The state writes the rules, licenses investors and keeps the register of applicants. A new Regionálny úrad pre územné plánovanie a výstavbu (regional office for planning and building permits) has handled permits under the construction law in force since April 2025. The city supplies land and a share of the flats. By March 2026 it had 800 flats on four sites prepared and some 2,500 Košice households registered. Agency chief Eva Lisová put a typical two-room market let at €800 to €900, against about €600 in the scheme and under €300 with an employer's contribution.

Direct help for non-profit and cooperative housing is thinner. The Štátny fond rozvoja bývania (State Housing Development Fund) lends to towns building rental flats, as neighbouring Trebišov did in 2021. The city itself leases derelict flats to NGOs for Housing First. A 2021 pilot with ten flats, run by an NGO acting as a social rental agency, is documented in Eurofound's study of unaffordable and inadequate housing. The OECD's review of Europe's social economy notes that Košice writes social clauses into public procurement and built social enterprise into its development strategy.

From our library

Unaffordable and inadequate housing in Europe

Documents the Košice Housing First pilot run with an NGO acting as a social rental agency.

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From our library

Social Economy in Europe: Contributing to Competitiveness and Prosperity, Local Economic and Employment Development (LEED)

Notes Košice's social clauses in procurement and its social-economy strategy.

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For empty buildings the lever is reuse. Act 77/2025 amended the rental law so that a non-residential building converted into flats can enter the state-supported system. Offices, hostels and depots can now become regulated rental homes. The city has done this before for culture. For the 2013 European Capital of Culture it turned a barracks, a 1960s swimming pool and a tobacco factory into public venues.

Climate policy points the same way. In June 2025 Košice became the first Slovak city with the EU label for 100 climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030. It plans to cut CO₂ emissions by more than 600,000 tonnes a year and to draw geothermal heat from the Košice basin. The new land-use plan keeps green space at up to a third of the city's area, which makes brownfield land and existing buildings the obvious places for new homes.

Few in Košice argue against more rental housing. The dispute is over who ends up owning it. The mayor and the agency present the joint venture as the fastest route to regulated rents. Critics object that the flats stay with private investors while the city contributes land and the state forgoes tax. Štefan Kišš of the opposition party Progressive Slovakia made that case when the investor contracts were approved.

KOSMALT is where the city's two housing stories meet. The 13-storey block on Terasa was built in the 1960s as a hostel for East Slovak Ironworks labourers. The Košice studio Atrium Architekti kept its prefabricated concrete facade and its compact room layout, adding loggias, a planted inner atrium and a reading room in the old steel mezzanine. It offers 15,625 m² of usable space near the medical faculty of Pavol Jozef Šafárik University. Its small flats suit nurses, students and young couples, and it is sold through a housing cooperative.

Jesenského Street in the old town will carry the first building of the state-supported programme. The first stage names four sites: 133 flats on Jesenského, 353 on Popradská, 197 on Clementisova and 38 on Thurzova. Prime Minister Fico called the partnership "a model example of how cooperation can work". The flats will be let furnished, with parking and play areas, at the capped rent.

Sociálne bývanie, a non-profit, works at the other end of the scale. In December 2025 it opened a 24 m² flat on Jesenná Street to a grandmother and her two grandchildren who had been living in a container unit. The city leased it the derelict flat for 15 years, and sponsors paid for the refit. The family pays €150 a month, and social workers, psychologists and lawyers stay with them.

Kasárne Kulturpark, Kunsthalle Košice and the Tabačka Kulturfabrik are the reuse legacy of 2013. A 19th-century barracks became exhibition and concert halls with creative workshops, a disused 1960s pool became the country's first Kunsthalle, and a tobacco factory became a centre for independent culture. None of them houses people. Each still shows what patient public and civic money can do with a building the market had given up on.

Creative Industry Košice (CIKE) took that experience into a European debate. It published Commons: Between Dreams and Reality, an anthology on running cultural spaces as commons, and its authors cite CIKE itself as a place that makes room for cultural practices slipping through the net of local policy.

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Commons: Between Dreams and Reality

The commons anthology published by Creative Industry Košice after the 2013 Capital of Culture.

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Kino Úsmev, an independent cinema run by film enthusiasts, belongs to the same line. The Open Heritage study of community-driven adaptive reuse credits Bratislava's Old Market Hall with persuading politicians and owners to open their buildings to civic use. It says that model paved the way for initiatives from Nová Cvernovka in Bratislava to Kino Úsmev in Košice.

Luník IX asks the hardest question of any project list. Pope Francis spoke there in 2021, and it remains the place where the city's housing gap is widest. The Housing First flats, the Jesenná refit and the capped rents on Jesenského are each small steps towards it. Together they sketch a city that is relearning how to own housing in common: through its land, its non-profits and a revived cooperative, three decades after it sold its flats.