It is supposed to be safer in cooperatives. But who will get the disputed land?

The draft act on the final arrangement of the legal status of land in housing cooperatives was prepared by the Polish People’s Party. It concerns housing cooperatives that built housing estates during the planned economy, regardless of the legal status of the land on which blocks, roads or kindergartens were built.

A good example of the consequences of such carelessness is the Koło cooperative housing estate in Wola. Today, approximately 1,500 people live in apartment blocks from the 1970s. This area of ​​Ulrychów was incorporated into the city in 1951. Earlier, on the basis of the agricultural reform, the land belonging to the pre-war company C. Ulrich, founded in 1805 in Warsaw and based in Gdynia, was nationalized. In 1994, property claims to this part of the land emerged on the basis of the company’s former shares, which some people consider to be collector’s items. The dispute is growing.

Reprivatization claims at a loss

The ruling of the District Court in Warsaw in 2025, in which the court dismissed the application for adverse possession of land by the State Treasury, greatly complicated the situation of cooperative members, opening the way to claims for compensation for the use of these lands.

Residents of the estate appealed to the Minister of Justice for help because the prosecutor’s office refused to file a cassation appeal, pointing out the lack of real grounds to effectively challenge the judgments. The tenants of the Koło estate can no longer be sure of their housing situation.

PSL wants changes to the law and the introduction of a statutory claim for cooperatives to transfer ownership or put land into perpetual usufruct, and to give priority to these claims over reprivatization claims.

Cooperative members are in a losing position under the current law

The project assumes standardization of the legal status of land owned by housing cooperatives, “which will directly translate into the possibility of establishing land and mortgage registers for premises that have so far only been subject to the cooperative ownership right to the premises,” the authors explain. “This will enable the holders of these rights to take out mortgage loans, trade in premises and fully exercise their ownership rights,” PSL claims.

The direct impetus for changes in the law is the judgment of the Supreme Court from 2013, in which the judges stated that establishing a land and mortgage register for premises located on land to which the cooperative does not have the right is inadmissible.