A pioneering affordable housing scheme in York is looking for potential residents.
Plans are being drawn up to convert the former Morrell House care home into one- and two-bedroom flats, complete with shared communal spaces and facilities.
And now the people behind the scheme are invited anyone interested to come along to see the plans and share their own ideas at a meeting tomorrow (Thursday).
Morrell House is near the junction of Burton Stone Lane and Burton Green.
Two community housing groups, YorSpace Community Land Trust and OpHouse, won funding to see if they could develop it into affordable flats run as a co-op.
The ‘Draw Your Dream’ community event takes place at Burton Green Primary School on Thursday at 3.15pm.
It aims to both inspire residents with the project’s sense of possibility, and attract people to join in with the exciting plans.
Potential resident Lucy Walsh said: “It’s an opportunity to meet the designers and other people who are thinking of joining. We get to think about seeing our kids play here, and meet the people who might become our neighbours and friends.”
Alice Wilson, a founding member of OpHouse, said: “Housing in York is hugely unaffordable and people are looking for ways to build not only affordable homes but also strong, supportive communities.
“We are being supported by the City of York Council to bring Morrell House into development to meet exactly those needs.”
Under the scheme, residents will set up their own housing co-operative. This means the people who live in Morrell House will manage the property maintenance, the communal spaces and their rents collectively.
And if members of the co-op want to use the space for wider community activity, they decide together on what can happen there; the existing hair salon, the large catering kitchen and the hall spaces could become available for community use.
There’s more details about the project here.
Morrell House: Q&As
Who will own the finished building?
Answers by Cath Muller, resident lead, YorSpace: The freehold of the land and the building will be owned by YorSpace Community Land Trust (a membership organisation for anyone who supports common-ownership of land in York). The long-leasehold will be held by Morrell House Housing Co-op (or whatever it ends up being named), a fully mutual housing co-op where all tenants are members and all members are tenants, or prospective tenants.
How will the owners ensure affordable rents now and in the future?
The housing co-op is also in common ownership, which means that the members can’t individually benefit from selling the property. The co-op itself needs to develop a culture of celebrating and promoting its values of affordability and inclusivity, so new people joining in the future are attracted by that mission and recognise that the payoff for affordable rent is contributing work and time to the co-op.
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The existence of the lease agreement can also include some restrictions and conditions
- it would likely mean that the co-op members can’t reduce the rent down to negligible levels, but will always be channelling their rent back to the YorSpace and the extension of property in common ownership and community control.
- it could include a condition that the co-op must have a proportion of members paying affordable or social housing levels of rent, to bolster the co-op’s own initial policies and values
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What sort of rental figures are you looking at?
So far as I know, we’re going for a mixture of technically affordable (80% of market) and Local Housing Allowance, but the figures are all still being crunched, so I can’t tell you what those proportions are. Having two tiers of rent will make life difficult for non-hierarchical decision-making of the members, so the cheaper we can make it overall, the better for the internal group dynamic.
The more money we manage to raise in gift and cheap loan finance, the cheaper we can make the rents, of course. So once we have a business plan and planning permission has been agreed, we’ll be going all out to raise a lot of money to support that aim.
Will potential residents need to be in a certain income bracket / come from specific job sectors to qualify for the development?
I don’t want to say definitively ‘no’, but that’s certainly not the intention, and it wouldn’t fit in the local area if it were that kind of community. If we don’t raise as much money as we’d like, it may be that we need a proportion of members to be contributing higher rents.
Who are the flats aimed at?
A real mixture. There will be one or two units that are suitable for two-parent, two-children families, but the majority will suit single-parents, co-parenting couples who don’t live together, single people (of all ages) who want their own flat and we’re also now looking at including some shared living for five to eight people.
The ground level accommodation will be level access and some kitchens will have low-counters to make them suitable for wheelchair-users. If we can get the lift working, the whole building will be accessible. We’re hoping for an inter-generational mix as well.