The housing-unaffordability problem is too big, pervasive and complex to yield to single, simple remedies. Yes, government at all levels has to play a substantially bigger role than it does now. But without substantial new federal funding and subsidies — which can’t be found on mainstream politicians’ lists of spending priorities — we might as well brainstorm about piecemeal, alternative solutions.

Having touched on co-living and cohousing in the last post, we bring you a continental variant of this idea: collective building.

This intriguing headline in the Guardian, “The do-it-yourself answer to Britain’s housing crisis,” offers an entrée: community members, with help from a land trust, building their own affordable homes. Britain even has an organization, the National Custom and Self-Build Association, to promote such efforts.

Self-building seems to be an even bigger trend on the continent. In Germany, baugruppen, or building groups, are active all over, and reportedly account for 10 percent of new homes built in Berlin. These are groups of people who come together, often with something in common (they might be musicians, say, or share a political philosophy), and take responsibility for acquiring land, hiring architects and contractors, and creating their own housing. For a summary of how it works, click here, or another brief description, here.

The baugruppe is a well-established form of organization in Germany and apparently gets a good deal of institutional support, including financing from a state bank. Whether something like this could work in this country is an open question.

Mike Eliason, a designer who was author of a seven-part series on baugruppen, seems to think it could, at least in a place like Seattle. For the first article, on the website of a Seattle advocacy organization called The Urbanist, click here. As Eliason describes it, baugruppen projects cost less than traditional models because they do without developers and marketing, as well as real estate agents.

It all sounds reminiscent of cohousing, except that it’s commonly done in an urban setting — as the photos in this post reflect. It also sounds like a fairly middle-class phenomenon, considering how much of a personal investment it requires of its participants. Who has the time and energy necessary to do all the meeting and planning and hiring and so on? Probably not someone who holds down two minimum-wage jobs. Not that we don’t need affordable housing, sometimes called workforce housing, for middle-class professional types, too.