From Commodity to Collective: Rethinking Housing Affordability in Jakarta

Community-led rumah flat in Jakarta show how housing can function again as a social good, not a speculative asset. Elisa Sutanudjaja traces this shift towards more just and affordable cities.

Housing in many cities has ceased to function as a social good. Instead, it is increasingly treated as a commodity: an asset to be traded, speculated upon, and accumulated. This shift has profound consequences for affordability, inequality, and urban sustainability. In cities like Jakarta, decommodifying housing is not an abstract ideal but a practical necessity. Collective and cooperative housing models offer one pathway to restore housing’s social function while addressing affordability and spatial justice.

Jakarta’s housing crisis is often framed as a problem of scale. The city faces a housing backlog of 1,197,648 units (2023). Yet the crisis is not only about insufficient supply. It is also about the growing disconnect between housing prices and household incomes. Jakarta’s price-to-income ratio stands at 10.3, indicating that housing has become structurally unaffordable for a large share of the population. Under these conditions, market-led housing provision alone cannot deliver inclusive urban outcomes.

How Rumah Flat Brings Housing Growth Back into the City

Since 2010, Rujak Centre for Urban Studies (RCUS) has consistently advocated for inner-city densification as a core response to Jakarta’s housing crisis. The idea was deliberately simple: four-storey multi-family housing, or a flat house, or rumah flat. The message was clear. Rather than pushing residents to distant urban peripheries, cities should increase housing supply within existing neighbourhoods, where jobs, services, and social networks already exist. Densification, in this sense, is not about high-rise towers, but about making better use of urban land while preserving everyday social life.

For years, however, this idea had no clear place in Jakarta´s planning regulations. The city’s planning frameworks were historically designed for either single-family landed housing or large-scale, developer-led apartment projects. This left little room for small-scale, community-led multi-family housing. As a result, people-led densification remained conceptually discussed but institutionally unsupported.

It was within this regulatory gap that rumah flat emerged. Rather than a new building type invented from scratch, it is a way to translate the four-storey densification idea into a formal planning category. Rumah flat was later formally defined and regulated in Jakarta’s 2022 Detailed Spatial Plan (RDTR). It refers to a landed housing typology developed on the middle-density plots ranging from 240 to 720 square metres, with a maximum of four storeys, and occupied by more than one household.

Medium Density as a Catalyst for Community-Led Housing

Why is the middle density crucial? While accommodating multiple families, it retains the physical and social characteristics of landed housing, rather than adopting the form of conventional apartment blocks. The typology allows for unit subdivision arrangements, enabling collective ownership and long-term management.

Crucially, the scale of land required indicates that rumah flat can be initiated and developed independently by residents, without reliance on large-scale developers or direct government delivery. This makes it particularly relevant to inner-city neighbourhoods in Jakarta, where plot sizes commonly fall within this range. By finally embedding rumah flat within the RDTR, the city effectively enables a decentralised and people-led housing transformation, allowing residents, cooperatives, and small collectives to act as primary agents of urban change within a clear regulatory framework.

Cooperatives Keeping Housing Affordable Over Time

The governance and financing structure that underpins rumah flat is equally important. Most initiatives are organised through housing cooperatives, which collectively manage land tenure, construction decisions, and long-term maintenance. This collective structure helps prevent speculative resale, stabilises housing costs over time, and distributes financial risks among members. Affordability is therefore not achieved only at the point of construction but safeguarded throughout the life cycle of the building through collective rules and shared responsibility.

This gradual, people-led transformation is central to the social acceptance of rumah flat. Instead of imposing abrupt change through relocation or high-rise living, residents can adapt their ways of living over time. Social networks remain intact, Kinship relations with neighbours are maintained, and everyday life is less disrupted because they are fully involved in planning, construction, and long-term management. Housing is not merely delivered to them; it is co-produced and collectively governed.

A Central Jakarta Pilot Showing What Is Possible

One of the earliest realised examples is Rumah Flat Menteng, developed with technical and organisational support from RCUS. Built in 2023, just one year after the 2022 spatial plan was enacted, it is located within the Dukuh Atas Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) area in central Jakarta. The project challenges the assumption that affordable housing cannot exist in high-value urban locations. Importantly, the building does not provide private parking. Residents instead rely on five mass transit options within a 300–600 metre radius, including commuter rail, MRT, LRT, airport rail, and bus rapid transit. This deliberate choice reduces construction costs, lowers everyday household expenses, and aligns housing provision with low-carbon mobility.

While Rumah Flat Menteng remains modest in scale, it is not an isolated experiment. Building on more than a decade of advocacy and practice, RCUS is currently supporting the development of at least ten additional collective housing sites across Jakarta and other Indonesian cities. These initiatives continue to test how decommodified, people-led housing can be embedded within dense urban fabrics. For cities grappling with inequality, decentralisation, and climate pressures, the lesson is clear: treating housing as collective urban infrastructure, rather than as a commodity, opens tangible pathways toward more just and resilient urban futures.