With a housing crisis worsening around the world, and gentrification driving people out of their neighbourhoods in favour of expensive, developer-led housing, alternative solutions are urgently needed to stop people being priced out of their home cities.
London is a case in point, with the city transformed since the docklands developments of the 1980s – a story now being replicated in other UK cities, such as Bristol, Manchester and Leeds. But, aided by a last-ditch act of defiance by Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council on the eve of its dissolution by Margaret Thatcher, a co-op showed how communities can come together to save themselves from displacement by planners and bulldozers.
Forty years on, Coin Street is a thriving co-op community, based around the Oxo Tower on the South Bank – and has demonstrated its lasting power as a pioneering model for people-led development of urban spaces.
Coin Street’s head of external relations, Cait Saunder, gave a presentation at the recent Co-op Councils Innovation Network (CCIN) conference.
“There’s been a lot of talk about the new government’s priorities,” she said. “Ministers want more housing – but are their plans radical enough?”
With soaring house prices, bold action is needed, she argues – and Coin Street offers a way forward.
Related: Government announces £20m package for community-led housing
The co-op dates back 1984 – the era of the yuppie and the rising dominance of London’s finance sector, when swathes of the capital were redeveloped. But in one corner of Waterloo and North Southwark, residents resisted when the demolition teams drew near. “They said no,” said Saunder. “They said, ‘we want to develop this area for us’.”
One crucial lesson from the Coin Street experience is that political support, especially at local level, is vital. Funds are needed for feasibility studies and grants are needed for house building.
In 1984, Ken Livingstone’s left wing Greater London Council, long a thorn in the side of the Thatcher government, was set for abolition. In one of its final acts – the night before it was shut down – the authority signed off vital funding and sold the land to Coin Street for £1m, under a restricted covenant to reduce its price.
“It’s harder today,” said Saunder, “but it can be done.”
Projects like Coin Street, she said, are not just about preserving communities and stopping people from being displaced from their neighbourhoods. The goal is to create, at local level, “a circular redistributive economy which is not a burden to the local authority or the government – we sustain ourselves.”
With four co-op housing units, shops and a community centre, Coin Street’s goal is to make money to put back into the community.
To show the value of this model, outcomes need to be measured; so Coin Street hired three researchers to look at what it delivers in terms of growth and quality of life, using desk research and field work to create a theoretical model and evidence base to replicate and extend the Coin Street model.
The study has found positive outcomes at neighbourhood scale – with homes created, a sense of community fostered, and power devolved.
Related: Housing co-ops look for growth in a time of crisis at CCH conference
Coin Street is a mixed-use neighbourhood, said Saunder, “purpose-driven with social mission and community benefits. It has a commercial head and a social heart.”
It enjoys independence – based on asset ownership – and is enterprising, she added, using commercial trading models to generate income.
The key outcomes are housing security, personal growth, social connection, a sense of belonging/community, a spirit of voluntarism and mutual support, and increased agency at both an individual and collective level.
Now these approaches are attracting the attention of policy makers in the context of a new government – especially at local level with ideas of community wealth building and calls for a place-based, mission-led social infrastructure.
“We need long-term reform, not quick fixes,” said Saunder, arguing that devolution of power to a truly local level, along the lines of Coin Street, offers a meaningful route to national renewal.
But can it be replicated, and how well will it fit with Labour’s national plans to remove objections from the planning system and fast-track housing developments? Can co-ops compete with big developers?
“There have been some successes recently,” Saunder told the CCIN, pointing to the recent victory by the Mayday Saxonvale scheme in Frome, Somerset. Residents had waged a five-year battle to create a five-hectare community-led development with 263 homes – at least 30% of which are to be affordable – workspaces, two public squares, a community-owned hotel, café and lido – echoing the achievements of Coin Street which constructed a park and riverside walkway.
Last year, the non-profit social enterprise behind the plan nearly lost its fight when the council proposed selling the large brownfield site it needed to a developer. But as with Coin Street, local protests forced a change of heart in the authority.
Crucially, the council is also helping to bridge an £80m gap in the finances of the project, which promises more than 10,000 sq m of employment on the site, plus a riverside park and playground.
There are downsides to this, warned Saunder. The community-led neighbourhood model requires arduous participation and even taking on risk: if some regulations, for instance around fire safety, are not met, it could even mean jail time. And ordinary people might not be ready to take on huge commitments like multi-million pound financing.
But the potential rewards are huge. Coin Street’s David Hopkins, told the meeting: “It’s not just about opposition to development, we brought forward a coalition of people – young, old, professionals, architects and so on – to propose an alternative.
“One of those people who joined the campaign as a child would grow up, live in the housing co-op on site, and have a family there.
Now, new development is planned at Coin Street, including a swimming pool and other leisure facilities, flats, commercial properties and a nursing home.
This, said Hopkins, showed how vital it is for communities to own their assets. “It means you can raise capital.”
