ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, a group of Washington, DC housing activists traveled to Johannesburg to help start the first housing cooperatives in South Africa’s history. These activists were from Washington Innercity Self Help, or WISH, a community-based group organized around issues of concern to low-and moderate-income people. WISH had been founded in 1978, and by the early 1990s, much of its work was directed toward helping low-income tenants purchase their buildings from their landlords and form limited-equity housing cooperatives-collectively owned housing that, because of restrictions placed on resale prices, would be affordable to poor people for years to come. WISH thought limited-equity co-ops were one solution to the displacement and unaffordability wracking Washington, DC. And it also thought these co-ops served as a structure within which people could become involved in their housing, an experiment in small-scale democracy that could pulse out into their surrounding neighborhoods, and enable local people to be empowered in their city at a larger scale. For WISH, housing co-ops represented affordability, collective control, and democratic participation. So when a group of Johannesburg tenants requested WISH’s assistance in starting their own housing co-ops in the immediate wake of apartheid, WISH was eager to help.
