Once a week, Michael Kerbler and his neighbours eat dinner together in a modern, open-plan kitchen built on the roof of their apartment building in central Vienna. Floor-to-ceiling windows provide an excellent view over the city and the park just below. There’s a well-equipped playroom next door so the children can entertain themselves while the adults chat over a glass of wine. Some of the food comes from the raised vegetable garden also on the roof, along with a yoga studio, library sitting room and large sauna. All the residents have their own flat in the building and for this they pay an average of €600 a month.
Gleis 21 is an award-winning, intergenerational co-housing project in Vienna that the residents own, operate and manage collectively. Plant-filled terraces encircle the four-storey building, built almost entirely from wood apart from four central concrete pillars. Unlike a 1970s commune, residents have their own separate apartments as well as access to the communal spaces on the 700 sq m rooftop. There are 38 units in all, including a two-bedroom guest apartment that can be booked for visiting friends and family.
The residents, who range in age from 27 to 72, came up with the concept, raised the money and oversaw the construction of the building. The core group was formed in 2015. By 2017, they had the architect’s plans and the funding in place. The building was completed in 2019 and they all moved in shortly before lockdown. The total cost of the project was almost €10mn. The group found €2mn themselves, the rest came from the bank in the form of a 30-year mortgage and they also received subsidies and a loan from City Hall.
One of the reasons Vienna is repeatedly voted one of the most liveable cities in the world is because its urban planning is centred on the question “is this good for children?” as opposed to “is this good for property developers?” The children who live in Gleis 21 walk across a park to their local school and have a community of neighbours who can look after them when their parents are at work. Meanwhile, parts of many of the world’s leading cities — including Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco, New York and London — are in danger of becoming child-free zones because young families simply cannot afford to live in them. Primary schools in some London boroughs, such as Islington and Camden, are closing because there are not enough pupils.
As cities such as London and New York enter another year where high rental prices are causing major social problems, could co-housing projects help ease the burden?
Vienna has several innovative affordable housing schemes aimed at different social groups. The co-housing model is popular with middle-class families who have some capital but can’t afford to buy and want to bring up their kids in the city. To make sure the property is never sold on the private market, residents of Gleis 21 do not own their flats. Instead, they own shares in the building company they formed.
Their monthly “rent” is their share of the mortgage repayment. At the start, each member of the co-housing group must pay €580 per sq m as a deposit (some flats are bigger than others). If they sell, they get that money back plus a bit more depending on how long they have lived there and how much money they have put in to pay off the loan.
A retired radio journalist, Kerbler is one of the oldest residents. He worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa and was impressed by how people in small villages cared for the very young and very old collectively and had found ways to resolve conflict. He and his wife didn’t like the idea of spending their old age living without children and younger people around them. “We were looking for another model of different generations living under one roof,” he says. “This is what brought us together. We wanted to change how society works and manage some of the problems of modern living collectively.”
Denmark was the first European country to adopt this co-housing model in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Most of the communities were formed by families with young children who wanted to share the burden of childcare. Since then, it has evolved to include single parents, empty nesters and older people. From the 1980s onwards, the Danish government has supported co-housing groups with low-interest government loans.
The first co-housing community in Denmark was Sættedammen, about half an hour by train north of Copenhagen. The group who built it were inspired by an article in a Danish newspaper headlined: “Children should have 100 parents.” It consists of 32 individual terrace houses with one big communal garden and a community house in the middle with a kitchen, playroom and laundry. Back then there was no government support, so the residents own their own house and a share of the communal areas. They can sell to anyone they like and there is no formal process for new owners to be approved by the community.
Morten Fangel, 79, a retired civil engineer, was one of the first to move there in 1972 and the youngest adult at the time. There are now 65 residents but the low turnover rate means two-thirds of them are now elderly, and the community struggles to attract younger families. Morten believes the traditional private ownership structure is a barrier because of rising house prices and interest rates. There are 14 children living there now, far fewer than in the early years. There is a voluntary agreement that if someone moves out, they will try to sell to a family with children.
There are always downsides to living with others but Fangel claims they have had relatively few disputes over the years. One of the biggest rows happened early on when cracks appeared in the walls, and they disagreed about how to deal with the problem. “There was a lot of shouting at our communal meetings,” says Fangel, “until we finally came to an agreement with the building contractor, but it was stressful.”
There have been tensions recently with elderly residents complaining about noise from the communal trampoline, which stands in the middle of the shared garden. “The children were screaming day and night so there has been a lot of discussion about moving the trampoline and not allowing in their friends who don’t live here. But I think we can reach a compromise.”
Most co-housing groups draw up their own rules on how to live together and how to share responsibility but this does mean being prepared to sit through long meetings with your fellow residents as you talk through difficult issues. Kerbler returns to the analogy of the African village. “In any democracy there are winners and losers and sometimes you don’t get what you want — but then you have to look at the positives.”
Finding land or an available property is the first step in any development. In Denmark, Germany and Austria this is much easier than in the UK or the US because the state earmarks parcels of new developments for co-housing. Gleis 21, which means Platform 21, is built on the site of a former railway goods terminal known as Sonnwendviertel, an urban neighbourhood south of Vienna’s main railway station. It now has over 5,000 apartments housing more than 13,000 residents.
It’s not unlike the area around London’s King’s Cross and St Pancras, home to one of the largest redevelopment projects in the city. Camden Council demanded some provision for affordable housing when it gave planning permission but it was minimal compared with the 50 per cent demanded by Vienna City Hall.
In Sonnwendviertel, there are private apartment buildings with doormen next to apartments subsidised by the city, giving the area a genuine social mix. This is another of the keys to Vienna’s successful housing policies. By building socially mixed communities, it avoids creating ghettos. “The big mistake is to create affordable housing only for poor people, it’s important to include the middle class,” says former deputy mayor Maria Vassilakou.
When Vienna embarked on redeveloping the brownfield site around the railway station, four of the buildings were earmarked in the master plan as co-housing units. These were subject to a competition that Kerbler and the other members of his group entered and won in 2015. “These people tend to be middle class, educated, motivated and socially aware,” says architectural journalist Maik Novotny. “They have an important role to play in the development of a new neighbourhood and, as far as the city of Vienna is concerned, they are the yeast of urban development.”
To win the competition, the Gleis 21 group had to put forward a concept of what they would do for the wider community. Their solution was to offer four flats to asylum seekers (selected by a local charity) and make the ground floor of the building into a performance space and café, which is currently used by a local dance group and an organisation offering after-school music lessons for kids. Both groups pay an affordable rent to Gleis 21, which goes to paying off the mortgage.
If someone sells and moves out, the other residents have the right of veto over who moves in next. “We had a German family who moved back home and so two members of the group were tasked with interviewing replacements,” says Kerbler. “We asked them to fill out a questionnaire so we could understand their motivation for wanting to live here.” Everyone has to invest 10 to 15 hours a month in cleaning and maintaining the common areas as well as carrying out administrative jobs, so they have to be sure new members will muck in and share their values.
On the same street as Gleis 21 is a co-housing group for older people occupying one floor of a multistorey building. The residents, aged 59 to 90, are mainly women who formed the collective because they wanted to remain in the city but not live on their own. In many European countries, this model is seen as a cheaper alternative to private retirement communities. It also allows older people to support each other, stay active, engaged and healthier and is therefore cheaper down the line because it keeps them out of care homes.
There is now a burgeoning co-housing movement in the UK, including communities for older people such as New Ground in Chipping Barnet, north London, which is exclusively for older women, and Cannock Mill near Colchester, an eco-village with residents aged between 60 to 83. In Cambridge, there’s the award-winning Marmalade Lane, a sustainable multigenerational housing development with 42 terrace houses.
In Leeds there is Chapeltown, which houses 33 families, and Lilac (low-impact living affordable community) built on the site of an old school in Bramley. Lilac has 20 units built around a communal house and garden with shared amenities such as washing machines and garden tools. Rather than taking on individual mortgages, the residents pay 35 per cent of their net income into a mutual home ownership society, which owns the houses and the land.
According to the Cohousing Association of America, there are about 170 established co-housing communities in the US, mostly in California and New York, where there are state housing grants available. Rather like the original Danish model, most residents own their own homes but share common spaces, which fosters community spirit but isn’t always affordable for lower-income families.
But whether you’re in Vienna, Los Angeles or Leeds, getting a co-housing community off the ground is complicated. Anyone embarking on this journey should start by getting practical advice from their local co-housing association or, in the UK, their Community Housing Hub. These projects are driven by small groups of highly motivated people, particularly in the UK or the US where there is relatively little help from local or central government in terms of planning, loans or earmarking land for co-housing developments.
According to a recent survey by polling firm YouGov, a majority of both Conservative and Labour voters believe the UK government should invest in more social housing. Co-housing communities are just one small part of the solution to this crisis but they should not be overlooked. Given the elections coming up on both sides of the Atlantic, policymakers would do well to study the Vienna model.
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