This short article presents a sociocultural practices framework that we feel is useful for better understanding the provenance of niche or ‘grassroots’ housing models in the specific sociocultural conditions of a given locality. Drawing on Davis’s Culture of Building concept, the framework connects grassroots housing development practices and responses with the sociocultural system formed from the land management practices of a bioregion. By using the development of the Swiss housing cooperative model to illustrate links between today’s urban housing model and the collaborative farming practices that preceded it, we contend that the sociocultural practices framework is useful for exploring the occurrence of specific grassroots housing models. Borrowing the terms ‘rootstock’ and ‘grafting’ from arboriculture, we further suggest that a deeply ingrained familiarity with collaborative development in cities such as Zürich is likely to make the inward development of newer housing models such as Cohousing that much more successful.