ABSTRACT
As urban housing in capitalist societies becomes increasingly precarious, both activists and scholars search for potential democratic alternatives to for-profit housing. Like other prefigurative organizations and movements, housing cooperatives champion the ideal of a more horizontal and egalitarian democracy as an organizing principle. Ideally, these decisions are supposed to be made through fair and equal deliberation in inclusive house meetings. Some skeptics argue, however, that cooperatives are too idealistic and that it is impossible to put these principles into practice. Yet there is no systematic research which examines the quality of deliberative decision-making in cooperatives. This paper moves beyond unsupported criticism and questions the common place that deliberative democracy is utopian. I analyze video and audio recorded data from house meetings of two cooperatives located in Madison, Wisconsin (USA). Using Conversation analysis, I find that, overall, these cooperatives resolve disagreement in a democratic fashion. Although these results are hardly generalizable, they suggest that housing cooperatives represent a viable alternative to the capitalist housing market.