See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative There are pros and cons. Sometimes buying in is really

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative There are pros and cons. Sometimes buying in is really expensive, sometimes you can't sell your share, sometimes it losses value. Sometimes the share is really cheap it's equivalent to rent apartment. My student housing in Denmark was like this. Buy-in was 10$ or so, and you could never sell. But you get to vote on things like, representatives, higher rent, maintenance, etc :) If I had to rent long-term I would definitely prefer that.