Capturing a legacy: Doug Smith chronicles co-operative housing in Manitoba

Published April 17, 2025

We’re proud to spotlight the work of author, historian and co-op member Doug Smith, whose latest publication Co-operative Housing in Manitoba: Past, Present, and Future, offers a rich and timely exploration of a movement that has shaped communities for generations. Published by the University of Winnipeg, this comprehensive report traces the evolution of co-operative housing in Manitoba, from its grassroots beginnings to its impact today and the promise it holds for the future. Smith’s detailed narrative preserves a vital chapter of Canadian housing history while sparking important conversations about affordability, equity, and community-led solutions.

CHF Canada: What was the main goal or motivation behind writing this report on housing co-ops? 

Doug Smith: Thirteen years ago I became involved with a group of people committed to establishing a housing co-operative in our neighbourhood. While my involvement at the time was limited to working on the marketing of memberships for a future co-op, I had a fly-on-the-wall view of how hard it is to develop a housing co-operative. Once our co-operative, known as the Old Grace Housing Co-op, opened in the spring of 2018, I set about writing a history of this developmental work, which was published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives — Manitoba. In the process of creating a context for that report, I learned a great deal about the establishment of housing co-operatives in Manitoba. I realized that there was a story that needed to be captured.  

CHF Canada: Who is the intended audience for the report, and what do you hope they take away from it? 

Doug Smith: I have never written anything with an intended audience. I hope that people who currently live in housing co-operatives will learn something about the history of their organization, that people who work in policy development will learn something about the various initiatives that governments at all levels took to develop housing co-ops, that students will be made aware of the simple existence of co-ops and the fact that they did not simply spring up out of the ground. In the process, I also hope that all these groups learn something about the interconnectedness of the co-operative and social housing movements, about how traditions of sacrifice and solidarity can bring something meaningful into existence. 

CHF Canada: What surprised you when exploring the history of housing co-ops? 

Doug Smith: Many things. The fact that housing co-ops in Canada owe their existence in part to the fact that a pair of Scandinavian scientists taught briefly at the University of Manitoba in the mid-1950s. Their tales of the Swedish co-operative housing model inspired an engineering professor of Icelandic background and Unitarian principles to consider establishing a housing co-op. The Scandinavians helpfully translated the Swedish housing co-op bylaws into English, and they became the foundation document for the Co-operative Housing Association of Manitoba (CHAM), which built Canada’s first continuing housing co-op: Willow Park. 

I was fascinated by the many roads housing co-operatives have gone down. While CHAM built large townhouse projects, in the 1980s development diversified. Manitoba developed housing co-operative for people with developmental and physical disabilities, it developed scattered unit co-ops as part of neighbourhood revitalization programs (buy a drug house and turn into a home), co-ops for people living with AIDS, co-ops for people from various ethnocultural communities, co-ops that converted churches, factories, warehouses, and apartment buildings into co-op. 

CHF Canada: How do you think co-op housing fits into the broader conversation about housing affordability and access? 

Doug Smith: Co-operative housing does play as significant a role as it should in this conversation. History makes clear that with relatively little government support, people who have relatively few economic resources have been able to establish co-ops that decades after their establishment continue to provide safe affordable housing. 

Read Doug’s report Cooperative Housing in Manitoba: Past, Present, and Future published by the University of Winnipeg.