Document Type
Article
Abstract
Scholars and advocates have emphasized affordable housing cooperatives as an important opportunity for shared equity homeownership. Yet, except for a few jurisdictions, these entities comprise a small share of the housing market. This article situates the limited presence of affordable housing cooperatives as arising from the constraints and frameworks of organizational law.
Using affordable housing cooperatives as a descriptive context, this Article advocates for an expanded view of what constitutes organizational law. A first and foundational claim of an expanded view is that while business entity statutes are important loci, organizational law is constituted by multiple areas of law. Secondly, an expanded view emphasizes not only entity and resource governance as key dimensions of organizational law, but it also highlights use and purpose governance as a constitutive dimension. Third and importantly, an expanded view is explicitly attentive to distributive issues of organizational law and the economic inequality it produces.
Deploying this expanded view and the dimensions of organizational law as analytic devices, this Article examines the multiple areas of law that structure affordable housing cooperatives. It also demonstrates how affordable housing cooperatives reflect the corrective-distributive approach of an expanded view. The Article concludes by providing a few principles and policies for strengthening the organizational law of affordable housing cooperatives with the goal of expanding affordable shared equity homeownership.
Recommended Citation
Jerome Hughes,
Affordable Housing Cooperatives as Shared Equity Homeownership: Part I – An Expanded View of Organizational Law and its Governance Dimensions,
42
Ga. St. U. L. Rev.
443
(2026).
Available at:
https://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/gsulr/vol42/iss2/10