Power and Control in Disinvested Affordable Housing: San Francisco’s Limited Equity Housing Co-operatives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The promise of the co-operative housing typology extends beyond providing stable, affordable housing. Co-operatives strive to offer a resident-centered site of democratic participation, where ownership and limited equity combine to provide both collective and shareholder ownership of a valuable community asset. Contentiously, local governments and civic institutions seek certainty and control in housing, prioritizing technical expertise and institutional relationships over deeper investment in resident-owner capacity. Affordable housing practitioners face complex and politicized projects, where co-op health is often threatened by mistrust, institutional failures, and funding scarcity. In San Francisco, more than 2,000 limited equity housing co-operative units constitute a significant portion of the city’s legacy 1960s and 70s federally-funded housing stock. Co-ops routinely fall into crisis, where residents rely on dysfunctional boards, ill-suited housing management companies, and insufficient government support for their survival. Numerous co-ops face critical survival questions, including deferred maintenance and disrepair, potential redevelopment, political instability, and waning institutional support. This client-linked thesis delves into the landscape of one local government's relationship with its co-operative housing ecosystem. Through dozens of interviews, a literature review, policy analysis, and several case studies of existing co-ops, this thesis elucidates present-day challenges and findings, and by discussing peer-city case studies of Vancouver, Canada, and Washington, D.C., proposes viable solutions charting a path forward.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".