How we live can help, says Andrea Jones, and Judith Martin says pocket homes are not the solutionRegarding Radhika Bynon’s letter (14 September) about housing innovation and scaling up solutions to make the sector work better, I argue that the true innovation lies in how people live, not in the building of more homes. During my PhD research into alternative living arrangements in later life I analysed the housing stock statistics to discover that if the current stock was divided up between every person (including children) in England and Wales, we would each have space the size of a double garage (41 sq metres), which is easily enough to live in. So the challenge is one of redistribution, not construction.My friends and I are doing the responsible thing as over-50s in the south-east of England: selling our family homes and moving in together, combining downsizing our personal space, passing on “stuff” and upsizing our communal play space. We will be releasing three family homes and moving into one large home and taking responsibility for looking after each other into our later years. Such moves shouldn’t feel like an innovation, but in our utterly broken market-based housing system it still is. We have used a well-established system (the housing co-operative model) to enable us to do it, and are working with others to help them do the same. Let’s keep the focus on sharing what we already have.Andrea JonesMember of Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust Continue reading…
Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Sharing rather than building is the answer to housing shortage | Letters
