As a housing coop, we do our best to both provide a loving and supportive home for the residents of Green Wood, as well act as a community resource for our community in Leeds. This means making the space available for meetings and events, hosting people passing through town or offering temporary accommodation for people in housing need, and using our energy and capacity as a collective to make good things happen. Over the past year, this has looked like: hosting a swap shop social for our neighbours, providing temporary accommodation and social space for people who need it, doing arrestee support and going to demos together, hosting meetings for organising groups and being actively engaged in local activist groups and community projects. We’re so grateful that having secure and affordable housing has helped to give us the time and capacity as individuals and as a group to be able to do all of this. We want to make sure that we’re doing this in a sustainable and intentional way, building caring relationships and deepening our political analysis and practice as we try new things out.

One of the projects we’re working on to improve sustainability and solidarity in the housing coop world is setting up the “Community Housing Alliance”, a secondary coop which collectivises the assets of existing housing coops so that rather than newer coops spending the majority of their rent income on paying high interest on their mortgages, coops with reserves pay off mortgages and the rent income from all member coops is put into a shared pot and put towards paying off the debt of other coops or buying more houses. We’ve got big hopes and dreams for this project, because we think it can significantly increase the amount of affordable and secure housing in our communities. If you’re interested in finding out more about this, get in touch!