While this pales in significance to wider problems with housing shortages it can have deeper impacts on the harmony of our university towns and cities.
Residents often feel that students don’t involve themselves in their communities and don’t take their responsibilities to their neighbours seriously. Cooperative housing is no panacea to such issues, but NUS firmly believes it can play a vital part in providing a range of housing options for students, options that can bring them into contact with cooperative principles and closer to their community.
It provides affordable, secure housing and it gives students control over their living arrangements in a way that actively promotes responsibility and a strong community spirit.
Most importantly, we know it works. There are some student housing co-ops set up in the 1970s which are still going strong today, and a number of schemes in operation or being set up.
The problem is that cooperative housing is the exception not the norm, a concept many students are simply unaware of as the growth in private providers gulfs other forms of housing in the student market. Students may now be familiar with shopping in their local Co-op but few would know they could also live in one.
Cooperative housing is good value for money with rents generally lower, but the greatest element is that cooperative housing would help reinvigorate democratic values and social responsibility. Over the last decade student housing has become increasingly isolating, with students compartmentalised into their own en suite self sufficient enclaves, dissuaded from interacting with one another or their neighbouring community. Cooperatives encourage participation, allowing tenants to decide how their co-op is operated and run.
But how can we make co-ops more common and what do we need government to do? Well, NUS is working with our students unions to help and support them to explore setting up cooperatives in their area. Yet progress has stalled as students unions need to be united with social enterprise developers, or alerted to funding options available to them to do more.
This is where the government can step in. The government could encourage universities to lease properties or land to cooperative schemes, and help broken relations between interested parties, funders and institutions. If the government are serious about social housing and affordable housing then they need to start offering financial incentives to encourage Universities not to simply sell their properties to private developers but instead make that stock available under a cooperative model.
Labour has had a chequered past on student housing. Groundbreaking acts like the introduction of the tenancy deposit scheme were sadly overshadowed by headlines telling students about Labour’s desire to rid towns of the blight of noisy students. HMO legislation came to signify restricting where students could live, not protecting them from bogus landlords.
While co-op housing will never incense nor rally students like the issues of fees or youth unemployment, students do care about where they live. In the recent Labour Students Refounding Labour consultation members remarked on the need for Labour to have more to say to students than just fees and funding. Offering students a cheaper, more reliable and interactive form of housing could help make our offer to students at the next election a tad more diverse.
The policy review will rightly focus on social housing, but we also need to think more widely about young people’s experience of housing and the options available to a generation which will struggle to get onto the housing ladder, and be more familiar with long term renting.
So cooperative housing may just be one aspect of the wider debate about our future housing needs, but at least on some level it could help to provide students with greater choice and restore relations between students and the permanent resident community.