Levent Kerimol

The recent report from the London Assembly Housing Committee shines a light on Housing Co-ops and Community Land Trusts. It’s encouraging to see community-led housing being taken seriously at this level. We appreciate the positive recognition our work has received from the Assembly and the groups we work with.

The full report recommends the Mayor should advocate for and allocate more funding as well as land for CLH projects. It also emphasizes the need to ensure that more Black and minoritised people can bring forward community-led homes.

We welcome the recommendations for funding. Land is essential for groups pursuing development, although we know this a complex, risky, and lengthy path for communities to achieve control over their housing, and even more so for marginalised communities with limited time and resources.

To see real growth in community led housing, we believe new approaches such as Collective Ownership are essential. We are working to establish the Collective Ownership Society as a scalable vehicle for long-term investment focusing on acquisitions to address the instability and disempowerment faced by private renters.

We encourage the Mayor and Assembly, as well as third-sector funders and investors, to get behind Collective Ownership as a way of making the day-to-day control and security offered by community led housing, quicker and easier to access by London’s diverse communities.

 

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Mariposa Grove Cohousing is a democratically-governed community in North Oakland including renters and homeowners.

Continuing to learn from other countries, our director, Lev was able to make a brief visit during a trip to the United States.

The scheme was started in 1998 by founders dedicated to activism, art, and affordable housing, who purchased two suburban houses. Another house was built in the rear garden in 2003. These three houses are split to form six condominium flats. The land was transferred to the Northern California Land Trust, who enforce resale price limits so house prices increase with the area median income and improvements, rather than increasing with market speculation. One of the founders later purchased a house on the parallel street backing on the original houses. This is let as a shared house, which opens out on to the shared gardens, and residents participate in the community life.

The gardens include outdoor dining areas, a chicken coop, and a tree house, and an open under-croft shared workshop and laundry space. The “common house” is a flat with a guest rooms (hosting a deaf student when we visited), an art room, play space, an office, a large kitchen, and dining space. Although each unit has its own kitchen, the large common kitchen/dining space is used for community meals, parties, social justice movie nights, as well as meetings.

There are currently sixteen adults, one teenager and four children living in the community. The importance of social justice, sustainability, and creativity are visible throughout. They share resources and responsibilities and support one another, striving to make decisions that work for everyone and are mindful of the wider community.
There is a lot of interest in living in there, although families must meet the income eligibility criteria.

 

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We have been hosted by CDS Co-operatives over the past seven years, and from April we will become an integral part of CDS’ mission to make community led housing more widespread.

This will mean some exciting changes, allowing us to pursue new ways of growing community led housing, exploring partnerships with community groups as a Registered Provider of Social Housing, and supporting projects both within and beyond Greater London.

We’re looking to make some changes to our online identity to reflect the new relationship, but we will continue to support community led housing as ever.

 

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