MOBA.COOP

MOBA bridges the structural gaps that make cooperative and community-led housing hard to realise in our region. We do this by:

• Advancing pilot projects in five countries
• Developing innovative financial instruments that reduce risk and debt
• Working with municipalities to unlock public land and legal pathways
• Sharing tools and peer support so others don’t have to start from scratch
• Advocating for systemic change in housing policy and finance

Our mission is to set off a wave of cooperative and community-led housing projects in Central and South-Eastern Europe to provide an alternative to the dominant housing practices that encourage financialisation and debt. Our model is non-profit and anti-speculative, rental and scalable. 

MOBA Accelerator is a cooperatively-owned financing instrument supporting community-led, non-speculative housing – and it is central to our mission.

In our region, long-term financial solutions do not develop because banks see no organisations with a proven track-record to lend to; at the same time, rental and cooperative housing providers cannot develop or scale up because they do not have access to long-term finance. Faced with this Catch-22 situation, we took things into our own hands and developed a game-changer:

The Accelerator brings in catalytic capital to bridge the gap of missing long-term finance.

The housing crisis in our region is context-specific and structural. So is our response.

After the mass privatisations of the 1990s, housing in Central and South-Eastern Europe was largely abandoned to the market. Cooperative traditions were forgotten. Debt was encouraged.

MOBA is is reimagining cooperative housing in the region and creating previously unimaginable possibilities by developing, financing and promoting a non-profit, rental-based cooperative housing model that is:

• Collectively owned – homes belong to the cooperative, not individuals
• Permanently affordable – rents are cost-based, not market-driven
• Non-speculative – homes cannot be sold for profit
• emocratically governed – one member, one vote
• Scalable – adaptable across cities and countries

We are part of the wider community led housing movement and inspired by recent cooperative housing developments in other localities and regions. While the model is new to Central and South-Eastern Europe, it is already being tested, lived in, and expanded through MOBA’s pilot communities.

MOBA is a growing ecosystem.

Whether you are:

• a community looking for a different way to live
• a cooperative, researcher, or financial actor
• a municipality seeking long-term, root-cause solutions
• someone ready to contribute skills, time, or resources

There is a place for you in this work.