Students take over: prefiguring urban commons in student housing co-operatives

Abstract

Student housing has become financialized in many countries, resulting in unaffordable and unsuitable accommodations that negatively affect students’ studies and health. Students are beginning to mobilize against these exploitative practices in resistive and future-oriented ways. This article analyses the establishment of student housing co-operatives in the UK as an example of prefigurative student activism, whereby students are actively creating alternative housing provisions that put them in control of the governance and management of their homes. Based on interviews with 27 key participants in the setting up of four student housing co-operatives in the UK, I explore how student co-operators are building actually existing urban housing commons under adverse conditions. Students’ youth and transience necessitates collaborating with secondary organizations, which leads to ambivalent alliances that show students’ persistent agency and political savvy. The challenges of growing the student housing co-operative movement contributes to discussions about the temporal and spatial expansion of the housing commons for future students, surrounding communities and broader housing struggles.

Keywords:

• Urban commons
• student housing
• co-operatives
• collaborative housing
• student activism
• UK

Introduction

In many countries around the world, student housing has become financialized, often through commercial partnerships between universities and private developers (Reynolds 2022; Sotomayor et al., 2022). Financialization has also seen the entry of venture capital financing into this ‘high-performing asset class’ and the mushrooming of purpose-built student accommodation (PBSA) high-rises in many university towns (Sage et al., 2013). PBSAs are the latest development in the ongoing ‘studentification’ of urban space, referring to the influx of large numbers of students and resulting urban changes such as early gentrification, neighborhood downgrading and residential displacement (Smith, 2005). In some cities, students are beginning to mobilize against this financialization, which can negatively impact their studies, wellbeing and health. Reynolds (2022) analyzes the Shanowen Shakedown in Dublin, Ireland, where students engaged in social media activism and direct action, including street protests and sleep-outs, to stop rent increases. Their mobilization brought about legislative changes that restricted further rent increases and provided better protection for students living in PBSAs across Ireland. In Toronto, Canada, students developed mutual support strategies, including advocacy groups and informal accountability mechanisms for landlords, to fight exploitative living conditions (Sotomayor et al., 2022). UK students have successfully engaged in rent strikes, occupied university buildings and set up Renters Unions to fight off rent increases (Joubert & Hodkinson, 2018; Steffen et al., 2022).

In this article, I analyze a different form of student resistance – the establishment of student housing co-operatives in the UK, which are ‘owned and democratically controlled by [their] tenants, abiding by the co-operative values and principles’ (Shaw & Farmelo, 2017, p. 58). There are currently four existing housed co-ops in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Sheffield and Brighton, as well as co-operatives in five other cities actively looking for properties. Drawing on the narratives of founders, supporters and early residents of the four housed co-ops, I show that the establishment of student housing co-operatives constitutes a prefigurative practice to build actually existing urban housing commons. Because of students’ particular circumstances, especially their young life stage, transient nature and precarious situation, the commons they create are expansive: they necessitate collaborations with external supporters to purchase properties and entail an outward-looking orientation, temporally towards future student beneficiaries and spatially towards surrounding neighborhoods. In addition, many of the founders articulated a strong connection of their own prefigurative housing practices with broader housing struggles and the fight against the marketization of Higher Education (HE).

There are to my knowledge no extensive academic studies of student housing co-operatives, in the UK or elsewhere.¹ My article is starting to fill this gap by adding a novel case to the literature on actually existing housing commons (Eizenberg, 2012; Joubert & Hodkinson, 2018). Analyzing the labour of student co-operators in setting up collective living spaces reveals a practice of urban commoning among a group of young people who are more often seen as either victims of the financialized housing markets, as part of the problem of studentification or as enduring exploitative conditions as some romanticized ‘right of passage’ (Kallin & Shaw, 2019; Sotomayor et al., 2022). By contrast, I draw on the stories of founders, residents and supporters to show students’ agency, in the process also providing a student perspective that has often been absent from academic analysis. In the remainder of this article I describe my methodology, situate my research in the relevant literature and introduce the four housed co-ops and their origin stories within a historical context. I then analyze three common themes of these stories: founders’ grassroots activism, their ambivalent relationships with support organizations and the challenges of growing this emerging movement.

Researching student housing co-operatives

My research, which began in early 2022, is guided by J.K. Gibson-Graham’s call for scholars to enable rather than strangle possible alternatives to capitalism through their research and teaching. The latter happens when academic analysis concludes that experiments to build alter-capitalist practices are always already co-opted and tainted, which ultimately reinforces capitalist dominance. Against this foreclosure of possibilities, the authors posit the responsibility of academics, alongside other ‘world-makers … to recognize their constitutive role in the worlds that exist, and their power to bring new worlds into being’ (Gibson-Graham 2008, p. 614). Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies program shows how giving visibility and credibility to projects and practices that experiment with other-than-capitalist forms, in which they include co-operatives and co-housing, creates spaces for them to germinate and grow. To enact these practices, Gibson-Graham, following Eve Sedgewick, propose a form of weak theorizing that resists academic skepticism and suspicion. In my own work, I have drawn on weak theorizing to propose the concept of generative theory (Schwittay, 2021, 2023). To craft academic work that actively creates the conditions of possibility for building alternative ways of being, dwelling and making in the world, generative theory takes a partial, cautious and nurturing approach to addressing social challenges. It does not aim for absolute diagnosis and grand solutionism but instead finds work-arounds, accommodations and fixes and recognizes the incompleteness, ambiguities and multiplicities of any response to these challenges. In this vein, my research into student housing co-ops aims to make the emerging practices of student co-operators visible, give them credibility and enable their growth.

Within this broader methodology, I have deployed three particular methods: secondary research, interviews and site visits, and active participation in co-operative activities. I firstly undertook extensive secondary research on the housed co-ops, studying their websites, social media pages, co-founders’ writings, newspaper articles and videos. This gave me contextual knowledge that informed the questions I asked during semi-structured interviews with 27 research participants, ranging from co-op co-founders and early residents to staff in supporting organizations. Initial contact was made through Linked In, other social media channels and institutional websites; recruitment quickly snowballed as word of my research spread through the small and well-connected student co-op network. Interviews were conducted mostly on zoom and lasted around 60 min. They took place alongside participant-observation research at SEASALT, one of the four housed co-ops, which is located at the University of Sussex, my home university, where I continue to interview current residents and attend meetings and events. In May 2023, I visited the co-ops in Edinburgh and Sheffield to gain a better understanding of the importance of physical spaces and to see co-operative living in practice.

Later that month, I co-organized, with SEASALT members and Student Co-op Homes (SCH), the UK national umbrella organization, a national gathering at Sussex University that brought together student housing co-operators from across the UK and Ireland and supporting organizations. This, alongside volunteering for SCH and joining the board of the Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust (BHCLT), which enabled SEASALT to obtain its property, is giving me more insights into the importance and operation of supporting institutions. It is also my answer to Gibson-Graham’s (2008, p. 614) question of ‘how can we participate in what is happening on the ground from an academic location?’. For me, this means actively collaborating with student co-operators and their supporters in the co-creation of knowledge and mobilizing university resources and networks to spread its reach and impact. Like Di Feliciantonio (2017), who analyzes the Spanish housing movement PAH as an example of Gibson-Graham’s ‘politics of possibilities’, I am working towards action-oriented methodologies to support the potential capitalist ruptures instigated by alternative student housing spaces and practices. In the next section I situate these practices in a historical and academic context.

Situating student housing co-operatives in the literature

A brief historical summary of co-operative housing in the UK

Although Britain is the birthplace of the modern co-operative movement, housing co-operatives have always been a marginal form of housing provision in the UK (Hands, 2016). Especially when compared to some European countries where collaborative housing has had sustained legislative and financial support, in the UK co-operative housing ‘has almost always been kept off the political agenda … more often because [policy makers] were ignorant that it was even a possibility’ (Birchall, 1991, p. 2). Within these constraints, Birchall has identified three historical waves of co-operative housing development: co-partnerships from 1901 to the early 1960s; co-ownership in the 1960s and 1970s, and since then common ownership, tenant management and short-live co-ops. All three periods were shaped by the varying presence of five factors, including otherwise unmet housing needs, the proven existence of broader co-operative structures, the presence of personal promoters, support through legal and financial frameworks and a favorable public attitude. By tracing these historical antecedents, Ishow moments when co-operative housing had momentum and potential, and the reverberations of these moments in contemporary student housing co-ops.

While the original Rochdale pioneers set up Land and Building Societies in 1861, these quickly became regular rental housing that was unaffordable to most working people (Birchall, 1991). Forty years later, the Ealing Tenants Co-partnership is usually considered the first successful housing co-op in the UK, with dozens of societies producing several thousand dwellings in what ‘at the time was considered a national social movement which had the potential to become the main vehicle for housing development in suburbs and new towns in the future’ (p. 6). Part of this prominence was that the co-partnership structure used by these societies, where tenants became significant shareholders which assured their commitment but also limited those who were financially able to join, was of interest to different groups at the time. These ranged from housing reformers, including the Garden City movement, who recognized its health benefits, to the Labour Party who applied it to businesses, to existing consumer co-ops and industrial philanthropists with an interest in worker housing. What united these disparate groups in their advocacy of co-partnership was that it served different political and practical agendas, such as addressing housing shortages without state intervention, providing a positive example to private landlords, presenting ideas for building self-sufficient communities, allowing town planners to practice their ideas and more generally harnessing the economic benefits of co-operation and diffusing class conflict. Co-partnership was thus palatable across the political spectrum and well-supported by emerging national-level organizations, resulting in land and finance being made available.

From these beginnings, the ideas of co-operative housing were continued by the Co-operative Party, and resulted in the second co-ownership phase beginning in the early 1960s (Birchall, 1991). This was modeled on the Scandinavian housing co-operative sector, where secondary societies provided infrastructure and managerial support to independent primary co-ops. In the UK, this phase reached its height in the mid-1970s, when 1,222 co-operative societies were registered and owned over 40,000 dwellings. This growth was partly made possible by the availability of loan capital via the 1974 Housing Rents and Subsidies Act, which allowed ownership co-ops, including the first student housing co-op, to register as housing associations and access associated funding. This ‘creat[ed] the politico-legal conditions for the massive expansion of the British co-operative housing movement – and its transformation into an alternative sector of public housing’ and allowed co-ops to become accessible to low-income people for the first time (Thompson, 2020, p. 86). 1974 was also when anarchist planner Colin Ward published his manifesto Tenants Take Over, which has inspired 1970s co-operative housing developers in Liverpool (Thompson, 2020) and current student co-operators alike.

The third phase of co-operative housing development in the UK saw the rise of three models spurred by this enabling financial and legal framework: common ownership, where equity in the co-op is owned collectively by its members; tenant management, whereby tenants assume control of and responsibility for housing management, and short-life co-ops that manage empty council properties. However, the 1988 Housing Act ended funding availability and co-operative growth stalled as co-operatives now had to rely on private finance (Birchall, 1991). Over the last two decades, there has been a revival under the umbrella of community-led housing, which refers to the control of local people or communities over their homes, using a variety of not-for-profit organizational structures and involving residents in housing governance and often management (Crabtree-Hayes, 2023). Small-scale government funding has led to a proliferation of community-led housing groups, including over 600 housing co-operatives, 253 Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and 20 co-housing projects (Arbell, 2021).

Struggling for an urban housing commons

In parallel to the resurgence in community-led and co-operative housing has been a growing academic interest, including attempts to provide more systematic typologies and definitions. In this article, I use the term collaborative housing, defined as ‘a modality of dwelling that meets three criteria: (a) a complex form of ownership that surpasses solely individual and state property, and that includes some degree of collective or co-operative tenure; (b) collective (self)management involving the dwellers in the estate; (c) and an architectural design that promotes everyday sharing of space’ (Griffith et al., 2022, p. 2). While collaborative housing is used more in the European than UK context, its attention to institutional, organizational and architectural dimensions best captures the practices of UK student housing co-operators.

Collaborative housing is part of a larger movement to create an urban housing commons that resists the financialization of housing, through prefigurative practices of living-in-common addressing housing problems collectively in the here and now. Hodkinson (2012) delineates three nested elements. Firstly, pre-figurative commoning is a pragmatic rather than confrontational approach focusing on everyday relationships created through living-in-common and their material and aesthetic forms. Secondly, housing-in-common protects housing commons against re-privatization. Thirdly, creating a common housing movement brings together diverse groups to transform all private housing into a ‘commonhold’ of collectively- controlled housing. UK student housing co-operators are engaged in pre-figurative commoning while also aiming to contribute to a common housing movement. Their co-operatives are an example of ‘actually existing commons [that are] live relics of the ideal of the commons; they are never complete and perfect and may even have components that contradict the ideal type’ (Eizenberg, 2012, p. 765). In his analysis of community gardens established by residents in vacant lots around New York, Eizenberg shows the importance of both material practices of gardening and alternative practical knowledge production. When gardeners experience themselves as part of a community that co-operates in the upkeep of gardens as a collective resource, they gain a stronger critical awareness of the operation of urban power structures and their own locations within these. They become active producers of actually existing urban commons.

The urban dimension is an important part of this alternative political project, as urban commons are well-positioned to generate new political imaginaries and experiments (Chatterton, 2016). They are not pure spaces of resistance and solidarity however, but partial and interstitial ones that always co-exist with multiple public and private forms of ownership, tenure and governance. The urban context also poses extra challenges, however, as cities are exposed to greater state regulation and capitalist dynamics: ‘life under capitalism can make it terribly difficult to find the time and energy to participate in the commons’, especially when low-income groups are attracted to their affordability above their co-operative values (Huron, 2018, p. 139). While most student co-op residents embrace the expectations that come with co-operative living, their transient and precarious situation throws up unique obstacles. Nevertheless, practicing horizontalism, direct democracy, autonomy and self-management is paramount for many student co-operators, who also embrace post-capitalist values in moving away from top-down models of change (Chatterton, 2016). These values give rise to a spectrum of engagement, from reformist groups working within existing structures towards incremental change, to more radical groups often engaging in direct action and seeking to position themselves outside the political and capitalist system. Once again, these different forms are not strictly delineated; how they co-exist and overlap can be seen in activist struggles that challenge the financialization of housing by strategically combining engagement, opposition and prefiguration (Fields, 2015). The urgency of these mobilizations increased in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, when the wave of predatory housing speculation crashed and homeowners and renters alike were left to deal with the devastating consequences.

In Barcelona and other Spanish cities post-2008, hundreds of thousands of households were facing evictions, due to massive indebtedness resulting from government policies promoting homeownership and predatory lending (Di Feliciantonio, 2017). In response, the Plataforma de los Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), building on pre-existing social housing and squatter movements, mobilized to reform Spanish mortgage law, block evictions and occupy empty properties to relocate evicted people. The aim of PAH activists has been to build decommodified models of housing through engaging with state institutions and adopting elements of autonomous struggles. In Ireland, a similar promotion of private homeownership and deregulation of banking resulted in acute housing shortages, increased homelessness and soaring rents post-2008 (Lima, 2021). All three impacts were felt most acutely in Dublin, where housing activists have demanded fairer uses of urban space through the high-profile occupation of empty government buildings to provide emergency shelter to the homeless. When market protections in the affordable rental sector were eroded in New York, renters in multi-family dwellings were exposed to predatory investments by private equity firms, which led to systematic harassment of residents and an extreme deterioration of living conditions (Fields, 2015). In response, community organizations produced actionable knowledge in accessible and policy-relevant language, appropriated the financial terrain and engaged in public protests. In all three sites, activist strategies articulated resistance to and working with state and market actors to maximize impact.

In the UK, practices of commoning are often inspired by the historical example of land being held in common prior to violent enclosures (Linebaugh, 2008). Past housing struggles such as the early twentieth century Glasgow rent strike and plotlanders’ self-build actions as well as post-WWII mass squatting started by ex-servicemen and their families in Brighton have created a historical repertoire of tactics and strategies (Joubert & Hodkinson, 2018; Ward, 2004). More recently, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have led the way in building mutual housing alternatives in several cities. In Granby, a disinvested inner-city neighborhood in Liverpool, activists took back empty houses that had been saved through anti-demolition campaigns and reclaimed by guerilla gardening. The properties were brought under community ownership to create affordable and ecological sustainable housing (Thompson, 2015). Alongside 1970s Liverpool housing co-ops, Granby activists were also inspired by LILAC, a local self-build housing co-operative where residents have been experimenting with legal innovations, self-governance and spatial forms of commoning (Chatterton, 2016). A CLT in East London was able to become part of a local development project to secure local affordable homes by working with London’s political structures and private developers as well as local residents (Bunce, 2016). These collaborations were strategic and at times subversive, and rather than rejecting them as neo-liberal co-optation, Bunce’s analysis focuses on activists’ creative savvy and alliance building to achieve their goals.

London has also seen the growth of renter activism, where local groups like Digs in East London and the city-wide London Renters Union have been bringing together housing groups united by a commitment to the ‘radical right to housing through de-commodification and de-financialisation’ (Wilde, 2019, p. 68). Activists use social media campaigns, public performances and creative interventions at discriminatory letting agencies, combined with a focus on material struggles in everyday settings. They resist evictions, challenge local authorities and enable precarious tenants to build alternative forms of care, circuits of values and diverse economies. Rent strikes have also been deployed by students to protest the marketization of their housing; the Cut the Rent campaign at University College London won concessions of over £2 million in 2016 (Joubert & Hodkinson, 2018). Strikes re-emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, when activist students at Sussex University founded a Renters Union and negotiated a 10% rent rebate (Steffen et al., 2022). A more prefigurative form of student resistance has been the establishment of student housing co-operatives.

Students take over

There were some early attempts to set up student housing co-ops in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the UK, foremost among them the establishment of Student Co-operative Dwellings (SCD – later Society for Co-operative Dwellings/Sanford Co-operative Dwellings) in London in 1967 (Hands, 2016). Under the leadership of the President of the University of London Union, SCD lobbied the government for five years before it agreed to fund a pilot project, for which a piece of derelict land on Sanford Street was made available by Lewisham Council. SCD, which broadened its membership beyond students to ‘housing for the young and mobile’, benefitted from the legislative openings in the early 1970s, becoming the first co-operative housing development to make use of Housing Corporation loans (Hands, 2016, p. 161). Today, the co-op is still flourishing as a general housing co-op.

The next significant action was not until 2003, when the National Union of Students (NUS) invited members of the North American Students for Co-operation (NASCO) to visit the UK, in order to learn from the many long-standing and successful student housing co-operatives in the US and Canada, where they house hundreds of thousands of students (Jones, 2019). Following this visit, the NUS, together with the Student Unions at several Manchester universities and partially funded by the Confederation of Co-operative Housing (CCH), commissioned a study to develop a potential model for co-operative housing in the UK. The study was carried out by URBED, a Manchester sustainable urban design co-operative; it focused primarily on how to manage a new-built co-op in Manchester and thus elided larger political questions of support for student housing co-operatives (URBED, 2004).² No action followed the report because of NUS internal politics and the general top-down nature of the project (Jones, personal communication; Evered, 2013).

Grassroots efforts by student activists were more successful, and in 2014 Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative (ESHC) and Birmingham Student Housing Co-operative (BSHC) opened their doors. Shortly thereafter, Students for Co-operation (SfC) was established by ESHC and BSHC founders as an umbrella organization to bring these, and other student co-operatives, together. In 2016, SfC commissioned a feasibility study to set up a national body of student housing co-ops, which identified limited access to finance, lack of co-operative knowledge and skills as well as high student turnover as the most salient challenges (ACORN, 2016). The study led to the creation of Student Co-op Homes (SCH) as a national umbrella organization, with the primary objective to increase co-op capacity through securing finance and purchasing properties. As a secondary co-operative consisting of independent student housing co-ops, SCH follows the support model of the second, co-ownership phase in UK co-operative housing history. It also provides financial, management, tax and other technical advice to the existing housed co-operatives. It is to their origin stories I turn next.

Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative (ESHC)

ESHC is the largest student housing co-op in the UK, with 106 residents living in two housing blocks organized into 24 flats. Frank,³ a key founding member, was active in the 2010 National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, as well as broader anti-austerity activism and student unionism. Frank was also interested in creating alternatives to the increasingly marketized HE system and, partly inspired by Colin Ward’s ideas, set up ESHC with a small group of fellow students. They had one historical example to go by – University Hall was established at the turn of the twentieth century by sociologist and town planner Patrick Geddes as a student self-managed accommodation – and also drew on more recent successful campaigns to cap rent increases in Edinburgh university accommodations (Shaw & Farmelo, 2017). The initiative gained support from university leaders, with the university’s Rector being committed to making student housing a priority and its principal having himself lived in a US student housing co-op. Following a Student Union referendum where 92% of respondents voted in favor of the establishment of a co-op, the founders began working with Edinburgh City Council and other co-operative organizations to look for a suitable property. At the same time, Castle Rock Edinvar (CRE), a local housing association, had taken back university halls it had originally leased to Napier University, which was replacing them with new-built facilities. Contact between the students and CRE was facilitated by George, who was working at the Scottish Co-operative Enterprise Hub, and other intermediaries at the City Council, and resulted in the long-term lease of the building to ESHC at market rate and, more importantly, retroactive payment. This meant that the students could collect the first months’ rent before making their initial lease payment; similar arrangements with other companies to pay in arrears allowed ESHC to get going with very little start-up capital. As a result, only nine months after the initial meeting, the first 106 students moved into the co-op in September 2014.

Birmingham Student Housing Co-operative (BSHC)

While BSHC, which occupies a 9-bedroom house, was established at the same time as ESHC by a group of students, among them John and Ben, who had also been involved in the 2010 protests, there are significant differences in their origin stories. Most importantly, in contrast to university support in Edinburgh, in Birmingham a much more adversarial relationship existed between students and university managers. The 2013 Defend Education Birmingham campaign involved the occupation of university buildings and police and legal action against protestors. In this climate of animosity, no university support for the co-op plans was forthcoming and the co-founders were instead inspired by existing co-operatives in the city, including the Redditch housing co-op and several retail co-ops. They also obtained support from groups like Radical Routes, a housing co-op network, and CCH. Ben had become interested in co-operatives during the 2012 United Nations’ Year of Co-operatives and it was during that year’s final event, which was organized by the International Co-operative Alliance in Manchester, that John and Ben established their first contact with Henry, an executive of the Phone Co-op, who had read about them in a Guardian article. The Phone Co-op would eventually purchase the Birmingham property and make it available to the co-op on a long-term lease. This was again facilitated by George, together with Robert, another early supporter who worked at the Birmingham Co-operative Housing Service. To make the co-op financially viable, two more bedrooms needed to be added. The first came from dividing a very large lounge area; a partition wall that was erected with the help of a builder father was plastered by the students themselves. Converting the garage into another bedroom needed planning permission. When the council originally refused, on the ground that there were too many student houses in this part of town already, an early resident attended the subsequent meeting and made an eloquent and successful plea for why BSHC would be a very different kind of neighbour. The co-op became famous for its Friday night dinners that brought together students interested in co-operative and broader politics, continuing the radical politics of its founders.

Sheffield Student Housing Co-operative (SSHC)

SSHC, whose 5-bedroom house opened in 2016, started as the MA dissertation project of Susan, an architecture student at Sheffield University. Inspired by friends who had started a housing co-op through the Radical Routes network, she was interested in whether a housing co-operative model could be created for more transient student populations. When Susan learned that student housing co-ops were much more common in the US and some European countries, she decided to test the possibilities of setting up a co-op in Sheffield and connected with ESHC and BSCH founders. Academic ideas turned practical when she joined the University of Sheffield Enterprise’s Social Innovation Lab. After successfully pitching her idea and being provided with access to workshops, expertise and resources to develop a business plan, Susan won the Lab’s business plan competition. This opened up new avenues of support and two fellow students came on board to actually establish the co-op. Once again, Henry, whom they met at a CO-OPS UK conference, agreed for the Phone Co-op to buy the property, similar to Birmingham. The founders never lived in the house but were involved in selecting the first group of residents.

SEASALT Brighton

Ideas for a Sussex University student housing co-op were first mooted in a Student Union officer’s manifesto in 2017. A core group of organizers began to form around this vision, among them Jasmine, who had become interested in co-ops after she joined the campus bike co-op and attended the 2014 SfC conference in Birmingham, where she stayed in the just-opened co-op. Rhian joined because of a pre–existing interest in participatory and co-operative development, while yet another founder had briefly stayed in a US student housing co-op. The name of the co-op – SEASALT (South-East Students Autonomously Living Together) – shows the founders’ aim to serve the diverse student population of Brighton with its two universities and several Further Education colleges. Money was raised from several sources, including the university and local council, which enabled the students to hire a part-time manager. They collaborated with the Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust (BHCLT), which in turn leveraged Homes England funding for community-led housing initiatives, on a community-share offer and the eventual purchase of a seven-bedroom house. The challenges of working in the overheated Brighton housing market and during the COVID-19 pandemic only provided an extra incentive for the founders to show that a co-op could be established even under such difficult conditions. After much searching and several unsuccessful bids, a former student house on the outskirts of Brighton became the co-op’s home; its ground floor was made wheelchair accessible shortly thereafter in accordance with the founders’ focus on inclusion.

These origin stories show the different ways in which the four co-ops have been set up, from the differential support they received from their respective universities, student unions and other secondary institutions to how the houses were acquired. In the next section, I am shifting focus to the similarities of these stories, to show shared motivations, processes and obstacles.

Creating actually existing student housing commons

What stands out among these similarities are the grassroots efforts by student activist founders, the ambivalent relationships they have established with supporting organizations and the challenges of expanding student housing co-operatives.

Student activism

In all four co-ops, it was the concerted and persistent efforts by students themselves that laid the groundwork for the opening of their co-operative homes. Weathered student activists often took the lead in these efforts, in part fuelled by personal horrible housing experiences. These ranged from viewing, in the words of Rhian, ‘disgusting, overpriced and arguably unsafe properties’ to being forced to live in them. Frank recalled that: ‘I had really experienced some bad housing, partly through the price, so I couldn’t afford where I was living for a number of years, which put me in a lot of debt and affected my ability to afford food and the like, which had a significant knock-on effect on my studies and my mental health’. While the founders shared this situation with many other students, they recognized their experiences not as a personal or even collective misfortune, but as caused by the structural forces of the capitalist housing market, the financialization of student housing and the broader marketization of HE. As Karim, an early Edinburgh resident, asked ‘Why am I working so hard, making myself so miserable just to make my landlord richer?’ These recollections show housing as a prime site for the articulation of the personal and the political, located at the intersection of market and financial forces on the one hand and personal and intimate spaces and relationships on the other. From this location, the founders decided to actively change their housing situation by setting up housing co-operatives, ambitions that were often rooted in previous political and activist work.

Frank, Ben and John were involved in the 2010 National Campaign against Fees and Cuts, when tens of thousands of students marched through central London to protest against planned education spending cuts and the tripling of tuition fees. There were also protests and occupations at many individual universities. Establishing a direct link between the collective experiences of these protests and subsequent campaigns, the founders recounted becoming ‘battle-hardened, stubborn and capable organisers’ (Shaw & Farmelo, 2017, p. 59). Even though the students lost the battle against tuition fee rises, which led to many protest participants becoming demoralized, among others it gave rise to a sense of politicization that generated new energies motivated by a ‘politics of possibility’ (Amsler, 2011, p. 78). It also generated a growing confidence, allowing Frank, for example, to become ‘quite cocky and confident, going into a meeting with people far older, because I was 21… and we’d got that through being involved in the Students Unions and protests’.

Awareness of new possibilities included an interest in self-help, mutuality and co-operatives, which resulted in the establishment of food, bike and re-use co-ops across campuses. These in turn generated spaces for critical discussions about capitalism and the marketization of HE, and about alternatives (Kallin & Shaw, 2019). Frank remembered meeting the BSHC co-founders during the 2010 protests: ‘we must have had a conversation about [housing co-ops] over a pint because the next thing I knew I saw online ‘oh Birmingham, they are also trying to set up a co-op at the same time as we are doing it’. And then going ‘ok, we know the people involved because they were all involved in [the 2010 protests]’. According to John, there was another direct link between these protests and the establishment of co-ops, because ‘if we can’t stop fees rising and prevent cuts to support, then we will need to find another way to make studying affordable. And that would be housing as another big expense’. Only four years later, SfC had been established as a new national co-operative network and ESHC and BSHC had opened their doors. These achievements show student activists’ ability and savvy to ‘switch collective labour that generates rents into alternative forms of housing provision’ (Joubert & Hodkinson, 2018, p. 189).

Many student co-operators I talked to were explicit that participation in co-operative activities manifests post-capitalist values. These activities, which include recruiting new residents, collecting rent and managing all financial and legal aspects of the coop, designing its policies and undertaking maintenance work, combine resistance with pre-figurative commoning (Hodkinson, 2012), as student co-operators are consciously modeling alternatives to the exploitative housing market. They are also helping other students imagine what is possible and in the process are creating a new social imaginary that pushes back against totalizing narratives of capitalist domination. As one early resident of ESHC argued, ‘we are socialized to believe that without capitalism there would be chaos, violence and disorder, and humanity would descend into anarchy. But the co-op is not a chaotic mess, it is a self-managing space [that] provides opportunities for liberating and creative work that brings the best out of the people’ (quoted in Pérez Ruiz & Shaw, 2019, p. 183). ESHC is one of the largest experiments of direct democracy in the UK, as it is run by general meeting rather than a board. George attributed this spirit partly to the Scottish independence referendum that took place in September 2014. The 90 residents who participated in the co-op’s first general meeting, which was held on the eve of the referendum, showed this spirit of collective democracy in action. Being closely involved in shaping ESHC’s fundamental policies and structures was seen as very empowering and exciting, if also exhausting, by its first residents. Through this involvement, students participating in actually existing housing commons have been developing a stronger understanding of power relations in HE, urban housing markets and local politics, and are strengthening their own political agency as a result (Eizenberg, 2012).

Perhaps not surprisingly, several of my research participants self-identified as anarchists, influenced especially by Colin Ward’s ‘pragmatic anarchist approach of solving our housing conditions in the here and now’ (Hodkinson, 2012, p. 438). Most student co-operators agree with the importance of establishing a supportive legal and financial frameworks, also recognizing their own dependence on state, market and other external institutions. This dependence gives rise to complex and ambivalent relationships.

Ambivalent alliances

Like housing co-operatives more generally, student housing co-ops are ‘both self-organized/managed and highly mediated through collaboration with state and professional institutions’ (Thompson, 2020, p. 87). However, students rely even more than other co-operators on support from secondary institutions because of their unique life stage. They are a young and highly transient population and usually without the established credentials that would give them access to mortgage finance. Obtaining financial support, professional advice, legitimacy and encouragement from external institutions is therefore essential for students’ co-operative work. The existence of the four housed co-ops is a clear sign that this support has been forthcoming, with many student co-operators citing the sixth Rochdale principle of co-operation (among co-operatives) as the basis for an intergenerational network of co-operators and other institutions in which they see themselves embedded. This network encompasses other co-operative organizations, local councils, community-led housing organizations and housing associations as well as universities and student unions, to varying degrees.

Most fundamentally, all co-ops relied on external actors, from CRE to the Phone Co-op to the BHCLT, to secure financing, including Ecology Building Society mortgages and Ethex community share offers, to obtain their properties. While in the strictest sense, this means that these are not housing co-operatives but rather tenant management groups (Hands, 2016), for the students the autonomy, control and security the co-ops provide them is a more meaningful definition of co-operative living. When financial institutions, including co-operative ones, denied BSHC a loan because they regarded students as too transitory, for example, the Phone CO-OP stepped into the breach, leading Paul, an early ESHC resident, to call its executive ‘a [Frederick] Engels of his time, putting his money where it should be, trying to help grassroots co-ops set up’.

Perhaps ironically, the marketization of HE and student housing also partly helped three of the co-ops get off the ground. When Napier University gave back its residences to CRE because the university was replacing them with newer, nicer accommodations, the halls became available for ESHC. SEASALT’s home in Brighton had been a previous student house that was being sold by its owner who was concerned about the large-scale construction of new PBSAs in town and the resulting potential lack of interest in the suburban property. In Sheffield, the co-op moved from a MA dissertation model to reality after Susan won a university social enterprise incubator’s business plan competition and subsequently received professional assistance. Such incubators have emerged in tandem with the growth of ‘entrepreneurial universities’ as another facet of the marketization of HE (Kirby, 2006). For all co-ops, the professional advice regarding business, finance, tax and legal matters provided by supporters working in co-operative development organizations, CCH or housing associations was essential.

Less tangible but equally important has been the bestowal of legitimacy, as ‘a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions’ (Czischke, 2018, p. 64). Frank remembered that ‘there was a lot of benefit when we got older people from the co-op movement who could attend meetings with us, even if they didn’t speak much. Just having somebody there with grey hair added a degree of legitimacy and made people take us more seriously’. Alongside these personal endorsements by older co-operative actors, the established co-operative movement and especially existing housing co-ops gave students’ efforts credibility and inspiration when no UK student housing co-ops existed yet. This support was based on the older co-operators’ confidence in the students. According to George:

it was clear that there was a really well organized, really capable group of students that organized all sorts of things. They had been at the leadership nationally against Cameron and Clegg around student loans. They were used to operating in a democratic fashion and carrying out their decisions quite expertly. And they were very ambitious. But they were also prepared to look and see what was deliverable and what wasn’t useful, and shape the vision to make that work. And that was impressive, I thought, and unusual.

Seeing students in action established trust in their ambitions and abilities and resulted in supporters like George, Henry and Robert endorsing and thereby enabling the students’ efforts. For these older co-operators, it is the renewal of the aging co-operative movement that is at stake.

As Henry put it starkly, ‘the older generation of co-operators know that they will die out without younger members, and supporting student co-operators is one way to bring about this renewal’. Older co-operators see support for their younger counterparts as a question of ‘intergenerational knowledge transfer’ and indeed ‘intergenerational justice’, in the form of passing on the skills and resources of an older and well-financed to a more youthful and energetic generation of co-operators. Conversely, Ben felt that one possible motivation of older co-operators was that they can see the post-war consensus around housing and education being ‘broken by neoliberalism’ and wanting to support student co-operators who are doing something about it. Indeed, many former student co-operators stay involved in co-operative activities, such as the co-operative university project at Manchester (Pérez Ruiz & Shaw, 2019). Some like Jasmine now live in general housing co-ops and several have gone on to work for co-operative organizations. Ben and John are active members of a Birmingham co-operative neighborhood regeneration project.

However, relationships between student co-operators and supporting organizations are uneasy and ambivalent. John was critical of the established co-op movement because ‘had they reacted quicker and bought houses when it was still affordable, there could have been more co-ops by now’. For others, co-operative involvement did not come easily for more personal reasons. Jasmine remarked that ‘the co-op sector is very white in the UK and it’s also quite old. That’s something I struggled with and it almost made me not want to go to co-op events and talk to people’. Such generational and identity gaps can be compounded when tensions arise around timely communication and transparent decision making. This happens especially with the organizations that own the co-op houses, where charges of ‘behaving like a landlord’ were usually leveled when difficult financial decisions needed to be agreed.

For SEASALT and the BHCLT, for example, it took a while to establish trust and a shared vision, but after some difficult conversations a good working relationship was formed and led to a successful community share offer and house purchase. These collaborative relationship have been tested more recently when rising mortgage rates has forced the renegotiation of lease payments in several co-ops. Ambivalent feelings also arise when some (anarchist) student co-operators’ values of direct democracy and alter-capitalism become entangled with the modus operandi of mainstream co-operators, who are more comfortable with board structures and professionalized staff. Here, managerialist consumer or retail co-ops were sometimes accused of being ‘risk-adverse and unimaginative’, in the words of John, or even as un-democratic. These tensions are by no means unique to student housing co-operatives and arise when collaborative organizations evolve internally or engage with external institutions (Jacobs, 2023). In response, student co-operators have also been forming relationships with more alternative allies such as Radical Routes, whose model financial spreadsheet was legendary among the co-op founders and helped the initial financial modeling in all housed co-ops. Student co-operators’ ambivalent alliances therefore speak to the ‘everyday realities of community activism in building commons within neoliberal urban regimes’ (Bunce, 2016, p. 148). In the next section, I examine the efforts to grow these commons.

Growing pains

Scaling has been recognized as crucial to commons’ survival: ‘without expansion, the commons stagnates, and may ultimately collapse’ (Huron, 2018, p. 145). Scaling also contributes to its growth and expansion, when individual instances of housing commoning can join together into a common housing movement (Joubert & Hodkinson, 2018). For student co-operators, scaling encompasses increasing the size of the actual co-op or opening more houses, and expanding the circle of people and groups whom they benefit. Here, the particular temporal and spatial contexts of student housing co-ops add new dimensions to academic discussions around futurity and studentification.

All co-founders recounted that they wanted larger buildings for their co-ops, to make a difference for more students, operate more efficiently or so as not to take away homes from families. Most importantly, they wanted to show that student housing co-ops can be a viable alternative to marketized student housing. According to Frank:

We had a meeting with the managing director of CRE, who said it’s 106 beds … and I just kind of had to keep a straight face … And I can remember George being a bit unsure, I think he said something like ‘if you want, we might have something smaller’. And I was like ‘no, this is a good size’ because I was personally not as interested in just starting a small co-op, I wanted something that was on a larger scale because we were already thinking of it as a movement.

The BSHC founders had similar initial ambitions of a several-hundred-bed self-built co-op but quickly realized that this was not feasible in the current circumstances. Their willingness to establish a smaller co-op and then add additional bedrooms was one of the things that helped build mutual trust and confidence with early supporters. In Brighton, Rhian and Jasmine insisted that the co-op not buy a house that could be a family home. Initial efforts were focused on larger properties and only when these fell through for financial and planning reasons was a former student house purchased.

Scaling can also entail opening additional houses, either in the same or in new cities. While this has not happened in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Sheffield or Brighton, there are active co-operatives looking for properties in Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol. All of these have been in existence for several years and some have come close to finding properties, but no purchase has been finalized at the time of writing. This shows the ongoing difficulties in finding appropriate properties and accessing financing, even though SCH was set up as a secondary co-op to help in this regard. Another reason for this stalled growth is high resident turnover, which is a feature of all student housing co-ops due to students’ transience. This means that new residents have to be recruited and inducted on a yearly basis, and sometimes more often, and in turn have to learn to participate in co-operative life. It can also lead to co-ops sometimes being forced to select residents who might not be fully committed to co-operative principles.

This ongoing labour can exacerbate general feelings of ‘post-development blues’, when the excitement and intensity of founding campaigns give way to the ‘more mundane realities of housing management, rent arrears and maintenance’ (Thompson, 2020, p. 96). Alongside all its benefits, co-op living is time-consuming and demanding work, entailing the daily governance, management and upkeep of houses. As Huron (2018) has shown for housing co-operators in Washington DC, the pressures experienced by especially precarious residents can put real constraints on their ability to participate. Students, impacted by double precarity created by the marketization of HE and student housing, often have to work part-time in addition to full-time studies, which leaves little time for co-op work. In fact, co-ops were partly set up to alleviate these pressures; according to John, BSHC’s lower rents were meant to avoid people having to work several part-time jobs to pay for their rent, thus having more time to contribute to the co-op.

Being involved in co-op work was nevertheless seen by all research participants as imparting valuable practical and life skills (Macías & Pérez Ruiz, 2018; Pérez Ruiz & Shaw, 2020). This includes learning to practice socio-cratic and consensus-based decision making, developing financial and budgeting skills, understanding and navigating legal requirements as well as DIY and home maintenance skills. It is here that the material and architectural dimension of collaborative housing comes to the fore. In all four co-ops, students changed the physical aspects of the houses, from adding rooms or making them wheelchair accessible to renovating basements, building bike storage and sheds to gardening work. This takes on additional significance when compared to the practices of private landlords, who sometimes convert common spaces into additional bedrooms to increase rent potential and thereby deprive students of important areas to interact socially (Sage et al., 2013). All co-founders were actively looking for houses with large social spaces and preserved these amidst physical modifications. More generally, the ability of co-op residents to paint or otherwise decorate walls, add shelves and change room layouts was one of the advantages of co-operative living mentioned by many research participants, who remembered the restrictions of student halls or private rentals with their beige walls and ‘don’t do this and that’ signs and rules.

Growing co-operatives also necessitates asking whom they benefit. In the literature, a distinction is often drawn between housing co-operatives exclusively benefitting their members and more collaborative forms such as CLTs that are also helping the wider community (Thompson, 2020). While this may technically and legally be true, the notion of stewardship broadens duties of care and responsibility (Thompson, 2015). Student housing co-operatives add another dimension to this debate and blur the boundaries between co-op residents and the wider community temporally and spatially.

Regarding time, many of the co-founders never lived in the co-ops they established, usually because they had graduated by the time the co-ops opened. They were thus acutely aware that their work was for future generations of students, a belief that continues among current residents. Setting up and taking care of co-ops so that the next cohort of students, which is likely to face the same acute housing challenges, can find affordable and safe houses is an important motivation for student co-operators. In other words, co-op residents are the stewards of the housing commons with a right to dwell there but also a responsibility to keep it in the commons for other students who should have access to it (cf. Bruun, 2015). This means that at a specific, material scale, housing co-ops can meet the immediate needs of their current members, while at a broader social scale they can ‘serve as a sort of promise to other would-be-commoners that they, too, will ultimately benefit’ (Huron, 2018, p. 56). This raises the question of who gets to live in student housing co-ops.

In general, because of the internal autonomy and physical limitations of housing co-ops, access to them is not available to all interested individuals. Depending on selection processes, it can be restricted due to nepotism (Bruun, 2015) or favor those with the necessary time and skills (Arbell, 2021). Indeed, co-ops have been compared to gated communities because of their potential exclusiveness and homogeneity (Chiodelli & Baglione, 2014). In student housing co-ops, there is often a self-selection around lifestyles, such as food preferences, sexual identity or political orientation. Some co-founders were actively working to keep membership broader, with Rhian passionately arguing that

co-ops naturally attract quite alternative people, … but I was always very very keen that SEASALT was inclusive because I think alternative doesn’t always mean inclusive. At the core of what we wanted was sustainable, democratic, affordable decent housing and for me that shouldn’t be mixing with imposing lifestyle choices. In theory, it should be a place where everyone who identifies with the values of the housing co-op feels that they can live there.. If co-ops are going to be a viable alternative model, we need to go beyond that bubble.

The dynamics of staying inside or broadening the bubble surface every time a new resident gets interviewed to live in a co-op. This happens often given the high resident turnover, and the word-of-mouth recruitment method sometimes used can potentially result in more homogeneity (Arbell, 2021). They are a sign of the contradictions of actually existing commons, particularly between inclusiveness and insularity in the case of housing commons (Eizenberg, 2012). It is no surprise then that the majority of students and the general public, who have little knowledge about housing co-ops, often regard them as cool, non-stop party places to live; according to Rhian, SEASALT has sometimes been called ‘hippies on the hill’. Moving beyond these misconceptions reveals the spatial dimension of co-op beneficiaries.

This dimension is linked to debates around studentification and the resulting gentrification and community displacement of university towns (Smith, 2005). The popular discourse of students as noisy, messy and generally bad neighbors has led to neighborhood mobilizations, such as the National HMO (Houses in Multiple Occupancy) Lobby or Save Leith Walk in Edinburgh (Kallin & Shaw, 2019). Writing about an off-campus PBSA in a residential neighborhood in Brighton, Sage et al. show that it was ‘producing more volatile student/community relations in its immediate vicinity’ (2013, p. 2633). Faced with these dynamics, for some founders building good neighborly relations and showing that students can be positive members of the community was an important part of the co-op establishment process. Rhian and Jasmine told me about their outreach efforts in Brighton, going door to door to inform neighbors about the co-op and answering their questions. To this day there are occasional BBQs in the SEASALT garden to which neighbors are invited. In Birmingham, British Sign Language classes, which were started when a hearing-impaired student moved into the co-op, were opened up to interested neighbours and in Edinburgh, the basement converted by students into a social space is made available to community groups.

As Henry explained ‘if you change the relationship that people have to their property, it empowers them to change the relationship to the community they are in. It’s completely the opposite of building a huge block and dumping it in the middle of a neighborhood and have a lot of students who have no connections to it sort of ambling through’. Building connections with their surrounding neighbourhoods is therefore an important intervention by student co-operators in the studentification debate. By actively creating shared interactions and experiences, student housing co-operators can not only counter the negative perception of students’ presence in the urban landscape but also contribute to the housing commons beginning to grow into a ‘neighbourhood commons’ (Hodkinson, 2012, p. 438).

Conclusion

The student housing co-operative movement in the UK is still emerging. The four housed co-ops in existence were created through different routes, and this article contributes to the literature on collaborative housing through an understanding of the multiple pathways that can be pursued in the establishment of collaborative housing by and for students, in spite of their transient and precarious status. I have also examined what unites the four origin stories: all co-ops are the results of persistent grassroots efforts of committed and savvy students, who had learned to navigate political systems through the involvement in national and campus-level student politics. They were supported by various external organizations, foremost among them co-operative support institutions but also local councils, housing associations and their universities and student unions in some cases. While the relationships between student co-operators and their supporters were essential for securing the properties of the four housed co-ops, they were and remain ambivalent and uneasy, because of value, age and identity gaps. Nevertheless, students and supporters alike have learned to collaborate across these gaps. They continue to do so in order to grow student housing co-operatives, navigating internal and external obstacles along the way.

The co-founders are very aware that their movement, as it currently exists, does not present, and might never become, a viable alternative to the financialization of student housing. What is more important, however, is to show each other, fellow students, universities and housing providers that more democratic, affordable, healthy and sustainable student housing provision is possible, in the process creating a space for imagining and building alternatives where none existed before. Similarly, studying student housing co-operatives can contribute new insights to the literature on the de-financialization of housing (Wijburg, 2021). The students who founded the co-ops and those who now live in them know that they are not idealistic utopias or pure spaces of resistances, but practical, actually existing housing commons holding care and mutuality but also conflicts and compromises. Students are acutely aware of the contradictions of a political project that enables universities and governments to withdraw from their responsibilities towards students and that necessitates alliances with market and state actors of whom the students are very critical. This does not condemn their efforts to failure or co-optation; instead students actively participate in the creation of a broader common housing movement by forging links with CLTs, tenants unions and other radical housing activists. While studying their work adds to our understanding of the complexities of contemporary housing struggles, for the student housing co-operators themselves ‘co-operatives … offer the first sprouts of the new within the old system, a glimpse of what society could be’ (Shaw & Farmelo, 2017, p. 62).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all my research participants, without whom this work would not be possible. Comments from three anonymous reviewers made this a better article while all errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anke Schwittay

Anke Schwittay is Professor of Anthropology and Global Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.

Notes

1 Sotomayor et al. (2022) mention the existence of Canadian co-ops. There is a literature on student housing preferences and residential satisfaction which is more instrumental, e.g. Zasina, J., & Antczak, E. (2023) The ‘gown’ unconcerned with the town? Residential satisfaction of university students living in off-campus private accommodation. Housing Studies, 38(8), 1536–1559.

2 URBED also experimented with CLT as model for urban regeneration in Northern cities (Thompson, 2020).

3 All names are changed to pseudonyms. All quotes from research participants are in double quotation marks.