Strasbourg

Strasbourg's cooperative housing takes three forms, and none of them is the classic rental cooperative. The largest is autopromotion (self-promotion): a group of households commissions its own building without a developer. Members usually hold it through an SCA (a société civile d'attribution, a company that allocates each member a flat). The second is the HLM cooperative, a social landlord owned by its members, such as Habitat de l'Ill. The third is the bail réel solidaire (a long lease under which a household buys the home while a land trust keeps the land). The coopérative d'habitants (a residents' cooperative that owns the building and rents to its members) exists in French law but not yet here.

The roots are philanthropic and municipal. The Stockfeld garden city was built from 1910 to house families displaced by the clearance of the old centre. The Ungemach garden city followed in the 1920s, 140 pink and straw-coloured houses built by a private foundation. The city founded its public housing office in 1923. The self-build revival began much later. In 2004 a group of residents formed the association Eco-Quartier Strasbourg, now Réhabiter. In 2009 the city became the first in France to offer municipal plots to self-promotion groups. A 2017 TU Delft thesis on co-housing and the energy transition draws on the practical guide those Strasbourg groups produced.

Today the sector has three clusters with different problems. The self-promotion groups are the most numerous. By 2020 they had built 92 homes, according to Rue89 Strasbourg, and by 2023 20 projects were occupied with 15 more under way. Their obstacle is land. Habitat Participatif France estimates that half of such projects nationally fail because they cannot buy a site. Social landlords, including the cooperative ones, face a different squeeze. Ophéa and its partners raised rents by 3.5% in 2024, and tenant groups blamed the state's withdrawal of support. The land-trust vehicle depends on public land and the Eurométropole's backing.

From our library

L'habitat participatif, une exception strasbourgeoise

How Strasbourg became the exception for participatory housing in France.

Read more →

The city treats these forms as part of its affordable offer. It reserves plots and up to 10% of the homes in its new urban projects for participatory housing. The Eurométropole also backs the land trust, whose homes sell at 30 to 50% below market. Strasbourg sits in NETCO, the Network of Cities for Collaborative Housing, alongside Lyon, Barcelona and Amsterdam. Whether that support grows depends on the politics that changed hands in 2026.

The March 2026 election turned on housing and changed the city's leadership. Catherine Trautmann, the Socialist who had been mayor in the 1990s, won the second round with 37%. The ecologist mayor Jeanne Barseghian took 31.7% and the Les Républicains candidate Jean-Philippe Vetter 31.3%. In April Trautmann was also elected president of the Eurométropole, which holds most housing powers. Her first move on housing is a conference to decide where rent control and new student housing should go.

Rent control is the sharpest test. France lets a city cap rents only through a national experiment, and Strasbourg's previous majority declined to join it. In June 2026 Paul Meyer, the new deputy mayor for urban planning, told the council that the city had missed that chance and might not be selected now, Rue89 Strasbourg reported. The outgoing mayor had argued for rent regulation too. Her programme promised 3,000 new homes a year, including 1,250 social homes, and a permit system for private lettings.

From our library

Stationnement, encadrement des loyers : les principaux points débattus au conseil municipal

The city council's debate on extending rent control.

Read more →

Each tier of government holds different levers. The state sets the SRU quota, the rent-control experiment and tenancy law. The Eurométropole writes the combined land-use and housing plan and funds social housing, putting about €30 million a year into the sector. In 2024 it noted that only 3 of its 20 communes subject to the SRU law met their obligations. The city controls planning permission for tourist lets. Under the 2024 Le Meur law it tightened those rules in December 2025, adding an energy-rating test for any flat converted to a tourist let (Eurométropole notice).

Support for non-market forms rests on land. The Eurométropole's land trust, OFS Alsace, has delivered 140 homes under the bail réel solidaire, with 500 more in the pipeline. The model mirrors the urban community land trusts spreading across Europe. The city's self-promotion calls and its participatory quota continue under the new majority, which has not yet published figures of its own.

Empty buildings are the other answer. Since 2016 the Eurométropole has paid owners to bring vacant homes back to the market, and more than 400 have been re-let. That is modest against the census count, and the scheme draws on the carrots rather than the sticks in the menu of tools for vacant housing. Conversions are starting. In June 2025 the former offices of the regional audit chamber reopened as 57 social student homes. Research on office-to-housing conversion in France shows why this stays rare: before the pandemic, conversions supplied only a sliver of new homes.

Climate goals push in the same direction. The Plan Climat 2030 aims to cut emissions by 55% from 1990 levels and to renovate 8,000 homes a year to low-energy standard, half of them occupied by modest households. The urban renewal convention adds €1.36bn of works in eight estates, among them Neuhof, Hautepierre and Elsau, to 2032. Social landlords are the main vehicle for both programmes.

Eco-Logis is where the city's self-promotion story became real. The group grew out of Eco-Quartier Strasbourg from 2004. Residents moved into its 11 homes on rue de Lunéville in Neudorf in September 2010. The building by the architect Michael Gies is held by its residents through an SCA. It showed that households could commission a city-centre building without a developer, and it became the reference for every group the city's calls have selected since.

Lieu Commun in the Poteries district brought the method into social housing. The HLM cooperative Habitat de l'Ill delivered its 15 social rental homes in April 2018, designed with their future tenants by the architects ArchiEthic. The cooperative movement's federation called it a pioneering project in France. It answers the charge that participatory housing serves only those who can afford to buy.

Star-Dock L'Alternatif at Starlette, on the Deux-Rives waterfront, was the first land-trust scheme in the city. Its 34 homes sell at about €3,300 per m² on an 80-year lease, in a district where market prices are near €6,000. Households pay a small monthly fee for the land. About 200 such homes are planned across Deux-Rives.

The Citadelle quarter, near the Parc de la Citadelle, is set to become the largest participatory district in France. Of its 909 homes, 102 will be designed by their residents, 26 of them as social rentals, by 2030. Nearby, the Coop district turns the former headquarters of Coop Alsace, a consumer cooperative that settled at the Port du Rhin in 1911, into a mixed quarter. The name keeps a cooperative memory alive in a district rebuilt for a new population.

The CohoUsing handbook features Colocation ELSAU, a temporary cohousing project for refugees in the Elsau estate. It offers 12 shared flats with common rooms at a low rent, and shows how shared living can serve people in transition as well as settled households. The converted audit-chamber offices on rue du Faubourg-de-Pierre make a similar point about buildings. With the Fritz Kiener site next, the city is testing whether empty offices can become homes.

Behind these projects stands Réhabiter, which still guides new groups and is now assembling a project group to found the city's first residents' cooperative. The step matters: it would add a rental form with collective ownership to a city that has so far built mainly for owners.