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They can include -

• sharing communal facilities such as
  • shared heating systems
  • shared energy harvesting
  • shared machinery / equipment
  • laundry facilities
  • shared visitors’ bedrooms
  • workshops / specialised tools
  • office space
  • sports / recreational facilities
• reducing travel / transport
  • working from home
  • home education
  • shared transport
• producing food locally
• shared recycling
• a shared knowledge base which makes use of local opportunities

• not everyone who you know that you respect, love and might want to live next door to has the ready cash to put down when a building plot comes on the market
• not everyone is totally enamoured of the British obsession with owning their own home. Many people would prefer to have control of their own house but not necessarily be burdened with a 20 year mortgage. After all, most countries in Europe are not so dependant on the ownership model.
• many people see the home ownership / nuclear family model as being a bit stuck in the 20th C. and would like a bit more fluidity in their lives.
• some people would like to make a political break from the capitalist model of housing finance we have now and be part of a more collective enterprise
• the deepening entrenchment of the class system in the UK is leading to a division of the way people relate to each other around neighbourhoods and housing
• many younger people are more mobile and are less keen to be totally sucked in to the long term ownership model
• older people would like to be closer to their families and community
• there are many particular interest groups where people want to live close to each other

An example of this is the  Lancaster Co-housing group. A core group of members who had been meeting and planning the project for several years found a plot of land and raised the cash to buy it. They and future members will go through the process of appointing an architect and a building company to realise the housing they want.

This is the way that the Findhorn Foundation has carried out the development of the Field of Dreams over the last few years. Built into this model is a strong ethos of using sustainable and low energy building methods and design. They are about to embark on another similar project

This is how the members of the Ashley Vale group in Bristol went about the process and there were ground rules about the types of building materials which could be used. See more about this project here. Another example of this model is the Plotshare service offered by Buildstore whereby larger plots of land which would be too big for an individual self builder are purchased and then split down into multiple plots (providing other self builders are interested at the same time.

This is a model used by the Community Self Build Agency as a way of creating affordable homes. There are provisions for teaching building skills to the self builders and the houses, when finishes, may be partly purchased and partly rented. This is a very interesting and unusual model because housing associations don’t usually like to get involved with self build due to the extra administration involved.

for Housing Co-ops CDS Co-operatives What’s a housing Co-op? from Upstart FORMING A HOUSING CO-OPERATIVE by the National Housing Federation

• Voting vs. Consensus and how well it is handled. There is considerable evidence that well run consensus decision making within communal housing is maybe slower but very much more effective in the long run than voting. This is especially true if three conditions are met.
  • the people involved must be in a basically robust and positive frame of mind to start with
  • when people feel threatened they should have a ‘buddy’ to see their side of the matter and not be rushed
  • very thorough minutes should be kept so that decisions are carefully recorded in order to avoid later conflict
• (These three conditions have worked extremely well at the Earth Heart community where they have always used consensus decision making and have extremely well kept records detailing all kinds of things such as a long debate about why members could have cats as pets but not dogs.)

• The ability of the group to raise money from external sources.
  • Most lending bodies such as banks, building societies etc. want to ensure that if something goes wrong they have a sound way of getting their money back. Ultimately this tends to involve selling the property in question on the open market. This can be awfully complicated if the owners of that property are also tied into other parts of the group’s financial holding such as shared land buildings or businesses. (It could also be disastrous for the group to have someone new move in who did not share any of the community’s shared ethics).
  • Charities are not able to provide finance to groups such as companies which can make a profit.
  • Local authorities which may, under certain circumstances, be helpful with providing land (especially if affordable housing is part of the scheme) have to ensure that they are not getting involved with anything which might later be seen as a money making scam.
• The proportion of money that people have to pay towards collective costs. During the construction period it may be imperative that everyone contributes a share of the design and building costs at the right time so as to not prejudice the group’s efforts. This may be particularly true in the case of infrastructure such as roads and services. After the building work is complete there may be contributions needed to shared facilities.What happens financially when someone or a family leaves the community?
  • Are they free to sell their house on the open market to whoever they want or must there be some type of approval by the group?
  • In what way does the newcomer buy into the shared facilities?
  • Does some proportion of the increase (or decrease) in the value of a property stay with the group?
• What happens if profits or losses are made by the community?
• If the community has some form of trading arm (say for instance it rents out its community hall to non members) how is the profit divided?
• A possible winding up of the community. If the community decided it was no longer interested in having any aims or property in common, how would the common property be divided up? This could have repercussions on conditional grants or loans which had previously been given to the community such as that a few individuals could not profit from them.

This is relatively easy to pin down (though very liable to change) because they are about fairly well defined values such as

• air tightness
• embodied energy
• healthy / toxic building materials
• energy harvesting
• handling of waste / sewage
• relationship to wildlife
• travel issues such as restrictions on car access
• provision for local growing of food

such as

• children’s rights and position in the community (can children vote?)
• noise levels (easily measurable - and generally enshrined in existing law anyway but usually a major issue in practice)
• visual neatness / chaos (extremely difficult to pin down)
• then come pets, smells, farting in public - god knows what.