Building Lives: are Co-ops the Only Hope Left?

Words: SGH Image: Hastings Rental Health’s new plot.
A co-op isn’t just a weird little group of people opting out of wearing shoes together, it’s a collective making a joint decision that something would work much better without any self appointed, self-entitled whoevers exploiting us or doling out unnecessary orders from upon high. Cooperativism is co-operating together to collectively take control of the levers. Because who decided there should be levers anyway?

In Hastings there are few large spaces left to build on – so the only options, it seems, for the lever-pulling large developers, are floodplains or greensites, and with pure profit motive there is no guarantee the homes built will be affordable for local people. This is why in an area like Hastings, housing co-ops are a better option. Co-ops control their affordability because they don’t need to make profit. The company is run by its tenants and its tenants simply need affordable homes.

A co-op may be small and seem less impactful, but it is also agile. Co-operative housing can be retrofitted homes or more sustainable small adaptable buildings in awkward brownfield sites. Which are everywhere, under used and often just flytipped. Brownfield sites provide little habitat for wildlife, so we wouldn’t miss these spaces. And we could use a lot of them, if the council would pull its finger out and support these endeavours in it’s Local Plan.

This is what Hastings Rental Health Housing Co-op are working on – we are partnering with a local landowner and retired architect to put together an Approval in Principle for an unused site at the back of a house. In this site we plan to build 4 x 1 bedroom homes. It’s not massive amounts of housing but it’s a framework for more developments like this, and with a number of these developments, we start to see serious impact.

There are many other community-led housing options too. Before we agreed this project, we were working with Hastings Commons Community Land Trust and architects Little Ships to build 14 homes above Crystal Square Car Park. Again, a pre-existing urban space that would not sacrifice our much needed green spaces, nor create housing that would be impossible to insure against inevitable flooding.

But the project depended on council, and council kept us waiting at the first step for several months. It’s been nearly a year now since our last meeting. We were told there is no council framework for these types of projects. Meanwhile Brighton and Cornwall councils have recognised the important role co-ops and other community-led housing developments have to play in tackling the housing crisis, and have written concrete policy to give them first refusal on sites, committed to numerous developments, and allocated budget to get them off the ground.

Brighton’s Bunker Housing Co-op would not have been built without council funding. If a council just next door can do this, why not ours? ‘Small is beautiful’ is the term coined by economist E.F. Schumacher in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. People matter, good affordable housing matters, nature matters, our planet matters. So let’s do them right.