Who else is out there?

YoCo’s proposals came out of a lengthy process which addressed the public vision for York Central and asked what it would take to create this. We’re not alone in asking this sort of question, and one of the great resources in carrying forward ideas like these has been the network out there of like minds.

Starting closest to “homes and housing”, there are more than 700 Community Land Trust (CLT) projects across England and Wales, and 900 UK Co-Op Housing organisations with 196,000 cooperative homes across the UK.

Some of these are well-known…

Marmalade Lane seems to provide the photos for absolutely every event on cohousing – a thoughtfully-designed scheme of houses and apartments with shared facilities and a largely car-free site providing wonderful, well-used external space. There is a rather wonderful post-occupancy report on how the project has worked on the website of lead consultants TOWN which can be downloaded here, and there are a number of other community-led projects which TOWN are steering here.

The UK also has a few projects which work with specific demographics; Older Women’s Co-Housing (OWCH) spent a number of years pulling a project together but were eventually successful in creating New Ground Co-Housing in Barnet. There is information on their website here, and a nice Guardian article reproduced here.

There are also good examples out there of projects which have – as YoCo intend to – worked within a setting of economic inequality and found ways to work with that to create a diverse and inclusive community. Chapeltown Cohousing (CHACO) in Leeds has used a shared-ownership structure which has the flexibility to enable cross-subsidy between residents bringing capital and residents needing affordable rent. There’s information on their website here, and an informative Yorkshire Post article (published before the scheme was completed) here.

But as a number of these projects touch upon, and as the CLT Network website points out here, community-led development can be about much more than housing. There is in some projects a clear understanding that local economy is key to making a neighbourhood which works – a bigger, broader “place to live” which addresses a wide range of issues.

Coin Street in London grew out of local opposition to conventional economics of land development; it was about affordable homes but realised that neighbourhood and community was also about economy. The group developed workplaces and other facilities which had economic value and used the income from these to fund affordable homes and community facilities – things which within a conventional market economy would not exist there. And they’ve been doing it for 40yrs.

Coin Street were part of YoCo’s “Don’t Extract – Redistribute!” event in 2023 which explored the beneficial impact of working creatively with local economy. We heard from a number of projects where creative approaches to local economy had enabled visions of better places to live – both in terms of homes and in the broader sense.

One of these was Mayday Saxonvale, Frome – a project where local opposition to the conventional development process quickly became a positive proposal for an alternative approach, and one based on local understanding of the needs of the town, framed within an economic manifesto – very much running with YoCo’s principle of “propose, don’t oppose”. Their rollercoaster of the emotions has taken many turns along the way – most recently with a council decision to sell the site to the mainstream developer whose proposals originally sparked Mayday Saxonvale, followed by the morning after’s drama of the developer walking away from it. Take a look here for the latest updates!

It's also well worth checking out the other participating groups from the 2023 workshop - Calder Valley CLT, Isle Develop CIC, Tyree and York’s Good Organisation.

Outside of the UK this understanding that housing is not an isolated issue is often better understood. Perhaps nowhere better than Vienna – regularly voted Europe’s most liveable city and as ”Red Vienna” with a long history of public investment in high-quality affordable homes. Even with all this, there is a strong and varied tradition of community-led development. This produces homes – often addressing needs which mainstream provision fails to satisfy such as refugees or integrating students into mixed communities – but also includes workspaces and facilities both for development residents and for existing neighbouring communities. There’s a lovely example here of the Vinzirast-Mittendrin development but if you want more, there’s a whole book of them available here.

Examples further afield include The Commons at Brunswick in Melbourne, Australia – cohousing sandwiched between ground floor commercial accommodation and a wonderful roof-level shared garden, un-prissy enough to have socks fluttering from clothes lines. Here’s a description on the architects’ website.

And there’s more out there. If you find a scheme you think might inspire us (and others!) then email us at yorkcentralco@gmail.com