One of the advantages is that there is a built-in mechanism for resident participation, particularly in the housing co-op model, either through a tenants-governed co-operative or a multi-stakeholder co-operative, where you have tenants on the board, but you might have a representative from the local health care clinic on the board as well. In any case, that's part of the DNA of a housing co-op. With a non-profit, you might or might not have tenant involvement, depending on how they structure their board. That's one advantage.
The second advantage is the community orientation of the housing provider. This is a different research project, based on the same data, where we looked at developers based on incorporation status. It was the developer that was incorporated as a for-profit that emphasized cost most strongly and did not have common space in the development. Of course, if something should happen to these rental housing projects, the assets of the co-op and the non-profit belong to the community. They don't belong to a private owner.
I would see those as the advantages.
What can you do? I know in the past you've had privileged partnerships with the co-op and non-profit sectors. I'm not sure that I'm prepared to say that should be done again, because so much of our rental housing is provided through private market rentals. They really are an important stakeholder. It's still, though, building the capacity of the non-profit and co-operative sectors. Again, these were the developers who were doing this for the first time. These were the developers who were learning as they were going, making phone calls to other organizations they knew of to learn about housing. So providing that technical assistance to these groups is a really important role you can play.