Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast. I’m Kieran Findlay, and today we are diving into a fascinating and increasingly popular housing model, cohousing.

With affordability and sustainability at the forefront of housing conversations, more people are looking at cohousing as a way to create supportive communities that promote social connection and shared resources.

But what exactly is cohousing? How does it work in Scotland? And could it be a game-changer for the future of housing?

Joining me today as I fly solo to discuss the challenges, benefits and real world examples of cohousing in action, we have Tom Morton, the convener of Cohousing Scotland, which is the charity representing cohousing in Scotland. Tom also leads Arc Architects in Fife and is the director of the Scottish Ecological Design Association.

We are also joined by Jenny Rambridge, a founding member of Hope Cohousing, the organisation behind a proposed Pathfinder project in Orkney.

So Jenny, thanks for coming on to the podcast. What is cohousing and how does it differ from traditional housing methods?

Jenny Rambridge

Well, I really think that’s a question to be asking Tom because he is ‘Mr Cohousing’. I can only tell you about cohousing from our point of view. If I just tell you very briefly how we started, which was six years ago.

There was a group of us and we realised that we had housing needs that were changing and that we had to address the problems which were not going to be unique to us. They would be problems everybody would face as they aged. And we decided, because we’d read about cohousing in the press and we knew a little bit about it from the UK Cohousing Network, that that would be the option that would suit us because it would give us support and it would address loneliness and it was all the issues that we faced.

Cohousing Scotland did not then exist. I think Tom, you had Vivarium?

Tom Morton

That’s right.

Jenny Rambridge

And there was a choice in Southern Scotland. So we kind of decided that this would be a model that would suit us. But we were starting from an absolutely nil base of understanding or knowledge about it. So I can’t tell you the answer to your question really, think it’s a one for Tom.

Kieran Findlay

So Tom, what is cohousing and how does it differ from traditional housing models, then?

Tom Morton

Well, I think Jenny did kind of capture the essence of it there, which is about where a group of people come together to find their own solutions to their housing needs. So formally it’s people living as part of an intentional community with some shared facilities, but with individual households. That can be manifested in several different ways, but fundamentally, you can hear from what Jenny said, it’s about valuing housing as a social investment rather than a financial investment. That fundamental approach to housing need with a different set of values means that you achieve a different set of outcomes.

There’s different formal definitions. I think in the Scottish Government’s Age Home and Community Strategy back in 2012, it said “cohousing is a form of housing in an intentional community which brings people together in groups to share common aims and activities. Each resident has their own home, but there are also community communal facilities, often in the form of a common building. All aspects of the development and management are undertaken by residents.”

I think that’s maybe rather restrictive terminology. There’s other ones going around, but the essence of it is that the people who are residents in the housing are the ones who lead the decisions about its design and management.

Kieran Findlay

So Jenny, where are you on this journey?

Jenny Rambridge

Well we’ve gone a long way. We’re at the point where we’ve got the design, we’ve got time permission, we’ve got building warrant, we have a site, we actually could start building like tomorrow, once we’ve secured all the funding. The funding that is holding us up now, the funding is being held up partly because there’s not an acceptance that this seems to me, that this is a viable way of doing things. I think that cohousing seems to be much on the fringe I think within the Scottish housing environment, social housing seems to be more supported and affordable housing and cohousing is just not mainstream and it’s very difficult to make it mainstream.

We’re at the point where we could build. I think Tom would agree we’ve got further than almost anybody else.

Tom Morton

Yes, that’s right. Maybe you could describe what your housing scheme is, Jenny.

Jenny Rambridge

Yes, it’s six houses in a terrace, six individual houses, and there’s a common space, but there are common room with the facilities and sharing social life and social activities and coming together. But one of the things that’s different about it is that it is a rental model. Every other cohousing project that we’ve explored has an owner occupied element and very often they have some rental or social housing as a sort of additional bit. Now our ambition is that we should be wholly rental because we don’t think that people who need this sort of housing or need to want to live in these sorts of communities should be constrained because they don’t have a property to sell.

But I think that’s what makes Hope Cohousing different. It’s different also because it’s the first UK, not alone Scotland, UK rental model, but it’s also the first project that as far as I can see that’s got so far as it has and one of the reasons we’ve got so far is that we’ve been very fortunate with the site. I think that site is very often the problem that stops projects getting very far, but we’ve been very fortunate because we’ve had the support of a local authority in finding and acquiring a site.

Kieran Findlay

Interesting, would the local authority be the landlord then? Would you be renting from the landlord or is Hope Cohousing a body that would own the buildings?

Jenny Rambridge

No, that’s another thing that’s taken us a long time to sort out is the governance structure. And we have opted in the end for a dual structure with the charity, which would be the Communities Housing Trust, building and owning the development and Hope Cohousing, is a community interest company acting as if you like, tenant management organisation, running it on a day-to-day basis.

The local authority are going to sell us the site, but they’ve offered us a grant for the price of the site. So in effect, it’s a gift, but there will be a transfer of property.

Tom Morton

I was just going to say, Hope’s a great example of how a small group of people with a huge amount of resilience and effort have managed to bring our project to be shovel-ready now. And over the last 20 years, there’s been maybe a dozen groups up and down the country all trying to do the same thing. And they’ve been coming from the same place of wanting to create a new kind of housing in a housing culture and structure in Scotland that isn’t really set up to foster that. And they’ve all tried to solve the same problems in different ways.

So Hope have a particular model that they’re developing, of governance and capital funding and ownership, but there are other ones that are out there. Some have gone through formal cooperative models and others are mutual home ownership societies. They’ve tried to address the same problems in different ways and develop housing designs and approaches that suit their particular circumstances. And some of these, Hopes an example of an island, a small island community, or other ones in rural areas, but we have ones in towns and in cities as well.

So it’s really irrespective of geography that this is an approach that people want to follow but there’s not a ready-made model that they can pick up and use. so groups have really been trying to reinvent the wheel, inspired by examples in other countries and wanting to make it happen in Scotland, but finding it’s really not very easy. In fact, it’s fiendishly difficult and most groups have failed. Hope have been, on the one hand, very resilient, but they’ve also been lucky. They have had tangible support from the local authority. They’ve had support from Aberdeen University and (Professor) Gokay Deveci, they are helping them develop the design and they’ve had access to the rural and island housing fund, which other communities haven’t.

So those things have allowed them to get to this stage. But what we in Cohousing Scotland want is to have a Scottish cohousing model that brings together and recognises the public benefits to this form of housing and that sets a framework in place that can be easily adopted across the countries by individuals and communities without having to reinvent all of this, make it a much more streamlined process that the public sector bodies can recognise, that funders can invest in, and that can be rolled out really with equity across the Scotland irrespective of wealth and physical geography.

Kieran Findlay

Tom, are your experiences of cohousing simply professional or have you lived in them personally? Do you plan to? Is this something that you might do in the future?

Tom Morton

It’s mostly professional coming from an architectural profession, and we’ve had various client groups approaching us wanting to develop projects. But, there is an intentional community heritage in Scotland, are a number of housing co-ops. There was quite a bunch, wasn’t there, in the 70s and 80s that came together in there’s still an Edinburgh student housing co-op and so on, which have all slightly struggled. So there is that background and there are one or two private mutual developments, I think, for people who didn’t need access to public funds and land and so on that have happened as well. So there’s a kind of wider hinterland and obviously of other forms of community-led housing.

But in terms of bringing it together as a defined model, recognising Scotland that suits our legal and financial structure, that’s the next step really for these projects.

Kieran Findlay

What about the examples of successful cohousing communities that exist in the UK and beyond? What are they? Could you talk about some of them and what they are doing well?

Tom Morton

Yeah, mean, cohousing is often seen as this strange and innovative thing in Scotland and you go to other countries and it’s seen as very much the ordinary of the everyday approach.

Kieran Findlay

They’ve been doing it all along, yeah.

Tom Morton

You can pick up the books and look at examples in America, is perhaps slightly more financially affluent, at least the ones that are publicised are. But if you look across Europe, it’s very much an everyday thing. I guess our leading example is probably Denmark, where the government saw 20 years ago that there was a problem of ageing demographics and wanted to take a proactive approach to that. And there was at this time this small-scale cohousing movement coming out of the eco-living thing from the 70s and 80s. And they kind of formalised that and gave it a structure and a framework and an investment, particularly to tackle the issues around loneliness and isolation amongst older people.

And now, cohousing forms the majority of new housing developments in Denmark. It’s heavily oversubscribed. It’s really very popular, both amongst residents and amongst the public sector stakeholders. And there’s 20 new cohousing developments in Denmark every year. But it took that sort of strategic support at government level to enable communities to deliver their own housing.

Kieran Findlay

Jenny, did you look at any specific cohousing communities that already exist for inspiration for what you hope to achieve on Orkney.

Jenny Rambridge

Yeah, the one which we looked at primarily was one called the Old Women’s Cohousing Project in London in New Barnet, where they have 27 houses and they are, as the name says, they’re a structure which is only women. But it took them 27 years, which is a bit discouraging, but they are, like the others I was describing, they’re owner occupied, but there is a small element of social housing in them, which mostly owner occupied property with a few empty ones. But they were the ones we went and we read about and we went and visited them and they were really inspirational.

Kieran Findlay

What kind of people are living in these cohousing developments? I’ve been to various housing events over the years and, by and large, there’s a representation for people who are in favour of cohousing and let’s just say that they are of a certain demographic. Is that typical to see it’s older people who are living in these things or is there scope or is there interest from other people and families and so on?

Tom Morton

I think it’s of interest to everybody really and they come through in the people that are making inquiries and are showing interest. I guess it is led by people who find themselves particularly in housing circumstances that are becoming more problematic. And in terms of the housing that is available doesn’t meet their needs. And that can both be people in a rural location like the group in Hope who want to come together to give each other mutual support, whereas otherwise they would increasingly suffer issues around isolation in their home area.

But also, there are other demographics, younger people also struggle to find affordable housing and student housing is a particular issue. We had, for example, a group come to us of people who had got together as parents of children who needed additional support. And now it was 20 years on and what had been a group of toddlers were now young adults and they themselves were becoming older and they wanted to develop a housing proposal specifically for their needs that would allow them to provide mutual support both for the younger generation but also for the older generation to allow them to stay in place in their social community and their geographical community because they were being told by the local authority that in order to be supported they would have to move 50 miles away from the landscape and the people in the community that they were familiar with and provided their social support.

So it’s all sorts of people in all sorts of circumstances. The project we looked at in Inverkeithing was co-located with a preschool nursery and with a community garden for mental health support.

On the one hand, housing is an issue that touches everybody and our situations change as we go through our lives and you find that there’s not always the housing there to allow you to thrive and it particularly does affect people as they get older and we know that the demographics are moving in that direction but the housing supply is not and so it is becoming an increasing problem that we just haven’t found strong and effective enough solutions so far.

Kieran Findlay

Jenny, what are the benefits of the project that you’re hoping to deliver and are there wider benefits to other people, other than the group that you’ve assembled at the moment?

Jenny Rambridge

Well, I think there are. Because if you look into, if you just look south and into England, the cohousing developments there, which are intergenerational, and they’re clearly very supportive in many, many ways. What we’re looking for is not only addressing the issues which Tom has touched on of loneliness, which is very damaging to health, but also in a community like ours, where we’re scattered, there’s physical isolation as well as social isolation. We’re in an area of high fuel poverty and there are a lot of people living in houses where they can hardly heat them, it’s too expensive to heat, so if you can create something which is accessible and is well insulated and is well built and is modern, then they are helping to address that.

There is also that issue of access that I just touched on, where there are people who living in houses and large parts of their houses have now become inaccessible to them. They can’t manage the stairs. There’s one couple in our group who have stairs which are a problem in the house. There are stairs which are a problem outside the house. Getting it in and out of the house is increasingly difficult and very often when it’s suggested that somebody could perhaps right-side or even down-side, right-side into a house which suits them better, they can’t go because it’s not accessible.

So those are some of the main issues. So what we’re hoping to address was the loneliness, the isolation, the difficulty with managing to maintain a property, whether it’s getting too old or too big, and the problems of heating. And also, we recognise, as Tom has touched on, that people are moved away from their communities if they need to go into some sort of residential care. Now, we realised that we needed something, but no way did we need residential care. So there seems to be a great lack of things which are between one and the other. And the houses which may be available to you on paper are simply not ever going to work because they’re not accessible.

Tom Morton

I think the key thing is this mutuality and that that’s locked in. All of the groups in Scotland have looked to put a great effort into achieving housing for themselves, but in a structure that would lock it for community benefit in the long term. And so that vesting the benefit in the ongoing needs of the community as individuals move on, but the need remains in order to support thriving and diverse communities across the country and there’s different formal structures and the way that can be manifest but it’s the same ethos that goes behind it. Looking to invest in housing for quality of life and for a social infrastructure not as a financial investment for a long-term return.

Jenny Rambridge

I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re going for rental because we can see this is something from benefit generations of older people after us.

Kieran Findlay

That’s another good point, yeah.

Jenny Rambridge

It’s a benefit to the community it’s a benefit to the actual local community in which we have lived in, in which we have worked for many, many years. Other people want to do that too.

Kieran Findlay

Yeah, absolutely. Tom, with your architecture hat on, what are the fundamental principles of a cohousing development and are there restrictions to regenerating or retrofitting existing buildings to kind of fit that model?

Tom Morton

I don’t think there really are any restrictions. The fundamental aspects of cohousing are that you organise the spaces to foster a sense of community and to enable people to be mutually supportive. So there’s a thing about the physical arrangement of the units and there’s a discussion to be had amongst the residents about how much they want to share space and facilities and so on, which, it depends on the individual character of the groups and varies to a greater or lesser extent. Everybody has an individual household, but they also have a shared aspect of facilities and landscape.

What tends to happen is that people put a higher priority on the social and natural environment than they do on things like car parking and private ownership. And so you tend to get far fewer fences, cars stay on the periphery of a scheme and the whole structure of the site is really focused on their shared humanity rather than individuality and vehicular access tends to be the characteristics. But I think you can deploy those principles across all sorts of architectural solutions

And in a way, this thing of keeping people in community and reducing the social isolation and being near facilities and reducing carbon emissions, I think will tend to move cohousing towards the adaptive reuse and the retrofit agenda, which has to be increasingly the solution for housing. Because we simply can’t keep building new houses. You know, the environment won’t sustain it. And there are plenty of buildings that can be adapted creatively to a high standard to support these kind of communities. We just need to put the framework in place to allow those opportunities to come forward.

Kieran Findlay

Jenny talked about funding issues earlier, but what other challenges and barriers are in place?

Tom Morton

Well, how long do you have? I think people have been trying to do this for 20 years and the fact that we have this one group in Orkney that’s nearly, hopefully, tells you what you need to know. There’s a whole subordinate of barriers. Partly there are technical barriers and partly there are cultural barriers. I think there’s a big barrier in that we just haven’t done it before. We’re not familiar with the concept. People don’t know what you’re talking about.

When you explain it to people, people think it’s a fantastic idea, but they find that their operating frameworks don’t allow them to support it in terms of housing grant, which will not fund shared facilities. There’s things about legal definition of houses for rent that you need to be able to sell them off individually if it came to that circumstance. And if aspects of it are locked in a shared mutual thing, it becomes difficult. We haven’t developed a model that suits the Scottish, that’s sort of tailored to the Scottish legal and financial situation. And that’s really what we need to do.

But I think the broader thing is, more culturally, is that I would say. It’s a funny thing, housing, everybody needs a home and it touches everybody. But actually, where the power resides to make decisions about housing is really vested in quite small places. And so, you know, at the core, cohousing is about increasing agency and housing to the people who have the biggest vested interests, the people who are living in that housing. But that is not where the power to make decision over housing is currently vested.

And it’s not that this is a threat to speculative housing developers and to the affordable housing supply. It’s really something that will sit alongside that as another additional option. One that does open up new sources of capital and opportunities that are currently not able to come into that market. And so I think that thing of setting the procedural basis in place by having a recognised Scottish cohousing model that measures the public value and the benefits to health and society from that would go a long way to opening up the doors that are currently closed to cohousing.

Jenny Rambridge

But Tom, do you see that as being something which would be adaptable from one group to another? Because I’m talking to somebody about the problems with financing.

Tom Morton

Yeah.

Jenny Rambridge

Because every cohousing project is slightly different. Everybody has their own particular embassies or their own particular facilities that they want, then it becomes difficult to push that into a standard mortgage or loan model.

Tom Morton

I think they’re not that different in the end of the day, Jenny. It’s more things like, you know, in Orkney, you’ve had support from Orkney Council in terms of getting that site. But Clachen in Glasgow, who had another cohousing development well developed. What finally broke them was that Glasgow Council said, ‘no, we won’t sell this land to you at the rate we would for affordable housing. We’re going to sell you on the commercial market rate’. And that cost just killed that project. And in other places, we’ve had local authorities saying, ‘well, we support cohousing in principle and indeed, you know, it’s in SHIP. But, you know, if we had sites that were available for housing, we would develop them ourselves for affordable housing because that’s what we are being told to do. We wouldn’t make them available to the community to self build’.

So it’s that thing where there is not a model that’s accepted at sort of strategic government level as something to promote the socially beneficial outcomes to Scotland. And there’s not a framework for the people who are making these decisions to make decisions that allow it to happen. And they’re not really been lucky because they’ve had that convergence, but it’s not really a way we can move forward.

Kieran Findlay

It sounds like that’s why the adaptability of current existing buildings is so important. If you can get a model right and if you can be lucky enough to be in a position to take advantage of one of these empty properties at the time with a model and with something that works, that’s where you can make some insight.

Tom Morton

Yeah, and a financial model that people understand and can put money into because it’s a legal model that is locked for public benefit and so on. We just need these templates. And then within that it can respond to the diversity of circumstance that individuals and communities have across Scotland. And it’s that sort of flexibility of response that I think we need to bring into Scottish housing, which is kind of too narrow and too prescriptive in its solutions. And they just don’t reflect the scale of the need we have for housing and the kind of pluriversal way that people live now. You know, we’ve inherited these ways of doing housing from the 20th century, and they’re really just not fit for purpose.

And if we want different outcomes, we need to take different approaches.

Jenny Rambridge

Do you think that the model that’s in Scotland is biased towards the Central Belt? Because it’s out in the rural and island communities where those larger social housing models are just not appropriate. That’s where you might find community-led housing being more popular.

Tom Morton

I think there’s an aspect of that, but I think that’s a symptom of the fact that housing is led by supply side. It’s not led by the people who live in the houses. And the reality is communities live across the country, not just in rural areas, and their needs and circumstances are different. People in Inverkeithing, people in Edinburgh struggle with housing as much as people in rural areas.

It’s just we do this thing of siloing, don’t we? You need a special solution for rural areas and island areas and a special for cities and so on. But actually, people need decent, affordable homes across the country. And that does require a locally tailored response. But everybody should have that opportunity. And you’re right, Jenny, we do have this rather monolithic system that’s not very flexible and adaptive to the diversity of our communities and the opportunities that are out there to make a difference. And if we can open that up a bit by creating new approaches to housing delivery, I think we can see some real gains in progress across the country.

Kieran Findlay

Is there a role for housing associations to take a lead in this? Obviously, the local authority has to be on board, but can housing associations be the ones pushing this agenda as well?

Tom Morton

I think so. wouldn’t necessarily say pushing the agenda. It does want to be a community-led thing, but I think there’s a big enabling role. You know, the role of government here is an enabling one. And, you know, there’s obviously a lot of experience there. And there’s a degree of financial and organisational capacity and resilience that would be supportive. But you know, all these organisations are hollowed out and they’re really struggling to deliver on their targets, to ask them to do more, it’s nice in theory, but in practice, is there the ability to support it? Not say you don’t have the frameworks in place to deliver that support. So I think that’s just why we’re, we’re keen to see this as an additional route to providing housing rather than one that places additional demands on already stressed out public housing provision.

Kieran Findlay

So, let’s talk about where we are in Scotland. There was an event at the Scottish Parliament in January. Tell us about that and what you hope to come from that event.

Tom Morton

Well, Jenny spoke there, Jenny, how did it, how was it for you?

Jenny Rambridge

Well, it was it was good to have the very good to have the opportunity to. Make the point that these are developments that should be being encouraged, but I didn’t come away feeling that anything was going to change soon. Would you?

Tom Morton

To be honest, Jenny, no. But I do think there were some useful conversations that happened. And Paul McLennan, the (then housing) minister, give him credit, he turned up and he spoke in support of cohousing. As Jenny says, we’ve been hearing warm words and seeing things in policy for 20 years now. It’s really about time we actually did it and got some action and stopped talking and started doing. that’s kind of the stage we’re at.

I think we’re at a pivot point Jenny and Hope in Orkney, there’s only a window of opportunity there. They’ve been now need to seize to deliver that. And we want that Pathfinder project to succeed and others across the country. And we want the Scottish Government to help support the creation of a Scottish cohousing model that can be used as a template across the country. And we really now need to actually do things rather than talk about them.

Kieran Findlay

And if anybody is listening to this and thinking of setting up their own cohousing community, Jenny, what advice would you give for them?

Jenny Rambridge

Be prepared to be in it for the long term. Be prepared to have to do a lot of work that you simply had no idea would be there to be done. It’s partly because there wasn’t another model that we could follow. We went down many sort of blind alleys. One of reasons it’s taken us so long is that we’ve had to sort of discover things from the beginning. Reinvent the wheel over and over again.

And I would hope that when we have succeeded, that we will then be able to bear as a one template or one model, one source of experience that will tell people how we went about it. They might not do the same way, but how they can go about it. The other thing that we struck lucky with in a sense was post-COVID. We struck lucky with getting grants because the sheer cost of pre-construction was over £150,000 to us. And we were, that’s not money which we have. We’ve got grants, we’ve got support, but we, after COVID, there were a couple of grants, big grants that we got, which got us to this point. So you have to have quite deep pockets to be patient.

Kieran Findlay

And Tom, where can people be directed to, to find resources and networks and co-housing in Scotland, you guys themselves?

Tom Morton

I think Cohousing Scotland, we’re kind of the sector representative charity which brings together the cohousing groups across Scotland. It’s free to join. You can come to our website, Cohousing Scotland. If you search up, you find the website. We’ve got recording, we run online events, sharing information with guest speakers and so on. There’s a whole bunch of those on our YouTube channel and we’ve got quite an active Facebook group as well, which is a good point for information to post questions and find out about future events and activities.

Kieran Findlay

Good stuff and if anyone is looking for links to these, then you can find them in the show notes of this episode. We’ll come to a close there. My thanks to Tom Morton from Cohousing Scotland and Jenny Rambridge from Hope Cohousing. I’m Kieran Findlay and we’ll be back with another episode of the Scottish Housing News Podcast in a few weeks.