Within the European Affordable Housing Plan, institutionally structured, member-governed, permanently affordable.
Not social housing, no demand-side subsidy, no means-tested allocation, but cost-based housing for essential workers, households with stable incomes that the open market has priced out.
The problem
Europe's housing market has a structural failure: European house prices rose 55% between 2010 and 2024, outpacing wage growth across every major market. For 8.2% of EU citizens, housing costs already exceed 40% of disposable income. The scale and gravity of the problem need no further elaboration.
The conventional response oscillates between three actors, each with a structural limitation. The market cannot deliver permanent affordability. The public sector lacks scale. Cooperatives lack execution capacity.
The model
COLETIVA has dual structure: two distinct but interdependent entities — one that builds, one that guards the mission, forever.
MOME Living is the enabler. Creates the technical, legal and financial conditions that allow cooperatives to exist and succeed — conditions cooperatives cannot build on their own. Develops each project from land to delivery, structures institutional financing, and operates the digital governance platform. MOME's role ends where the cooperative's self-governance begins.
COMUNS Union is the mission guardian
The second-tier union of cooperatives that ensures the platform's mission is preserved across all projects, all time horizons, and regardless of who operates it. Holds the asset-lock, governs the transition protocol, and represents the cooperative members institutionally [IRN approval of 20 July 2026 · NIPC 519551605 · Porto, Portugal].
Components
1. Right of Use and Occupancy
The member’s legal position, which combines the right of habitation over the dwelling with the right of use over the community’s shared energy and mobility installations. It separates property title from the right of use, keeping assets permanently outside the speculative market. It rests on the Portuguese collective-ownership housing cooperative regime (Decree-Law 502/99, arts. 19 and 22), with the Civil Code applying subsidiarily (arts. 1484 et seq.). Affordability is not a policy; it is a legal architecture. Indexed to HICP, redeemable at the rate of inflation only.
2. Renewable Energy Community
Each project integrates an energy community under Decree-Law 15/2022, as amended by Decree-Law 130/2026 (transposing Directive (EU) 2024/1711). Energy is produced, shared and governed by the cooperative — with the system sized to the homes' actual consumption, generating €25/month of savings per household and an operating revenue for the cooperative. Member saving and cooperative margin are complementary quantities and are never added together.
3. Shared Mobility
Mobility as a service integrated into the composite affordability model. A car-free or car-minimal design reduces the household's mobility cost, with an attributable deduction of €60/month against market equivalents — acting as an affordability intervention independent of the rent level.
4. Digital Governance
Decentralised governance infrastructure developed in exclusive bilateral partnership with Unlockit via Canton Network. One member, one vote — verifiable, auditable, and scalable across multiple cooperative projects without re-engineering.
Composite affordability
Not a market comparison. A share of income. COLETIVA does not compete on rent: the charge derives from cost and is measured against the income of the households occupying each unit type.
The blueprint project
First implementation and replication template: 400 homes in the Porto Metropolitan Area — designed to prove the model at professional scale, generate auditable financial and social data, and serve as the replication template for the national pipeline and, by adaptation, for comparable metropolitan markets in the EU.
Financial logic
COLETIVA is financed as social infrastructure, not as real estate development. A market developer must remunerate an exit, extract a development margin and dispose of the asset. COLETIVA does none of the three — the assets remain permanently within the cooperative by statutory asset-lock, and there is no distributable appreciation to any participant.
It is that absence which allows the charge to be set by actual cost — financing, operation, maintenance and reserves — rather than by what the local market will bear. The model rests on long-tenor institutional debt, complemented by patient capital in a subordinated position and by the members' equity stake. It depends on neither recurrent public subsidy nor asset sales at any stage of the life cycle.
The project's return is moderate, and it is so by design: value is delivered to the member, in the form of a permanently affordable charge, instead of being extracted as return on capital.
Alignment
Built for the European moment: COLETIVA is the direct operational response to the EU Affordable Housing Plan — aligned with every major European financial and regulatory framework.
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