Visitors were asked to share their thoughts on what ‘Home’ means to them. 

Members of Brixton’s housing co-operatives pleaded for more protection for social housing at a meeting in Brixton, demanding: “We don’t want to be the victims of gentrification!”

Jessica Jacobs and Emily O’Mara, founders of ‘coopsforlondon’, an organization that pleads for affordable housing to ‘achieve better quality of life for certain collectives’ spoke out at the event ‘The End of Social Housing?’ at Brixton Library on 22 November.

In a heated discussion with Lambeth Councillor Jane Pickard they said they wanted their local government to ‘control gentrification and to protect the local community from it’ and that they didn’t understand ‘why that is such a hard thing to do’.

While Pickard said the main reason why she attended the event was to ‘hear ideas on combatting gentrification’, Jacobs argued that the Council could put more effort into developing actual policies to support housing co-operatives and help combat gentrification.

She said that Lambeth Council should try to ‘discuss information with different people’ to find out what the key issues of gentrification are and use this information to develop a policy.

O’Mara also mentioned that Mayor Sadiq Khan has promised to make social housing his priority before, but that nevertheless housing co-ops are still rarely mentioned and that there is barely any financial support for them.

Cooperative housing can take many forms but is defined as ‘an alternate form of ownership of homes and property, in which the property is owned by an organization and then sold as shares to the residents of the community. Cooperative housing splits costs on shared housing amenities and is frequently used as a part of an intentional community initiative.’

Pickard ended the discussion by saying that she agreed with their ideas, but that it wasn’t ‘an easy issue for the local government to solve’ and that they were trying their hardest to offer the community the support they needed.

Jacobs and O’Mara have publicly confronted the issue before by launching a report in May 2017, which represents the main values that ‘coopsforlondon’ stands for. The report says that if housing cooperatives ‘are to succeed in today’s London, they need real investment and procedural and legal support.’

O’Mara said that she feels like ‘people don’t really know what housing co-ops are, and we want to change that, we want more people to hear about co-ops’, so she was very pleased with the amount of people that attended the event.

Visitors were encouraged to participate in creating a felt map that should represent concerns people have when it comes to social housing. Jacobs and O’Mara plan on displaying this map in a public place in order to make a statement to Lambeth Council and to show that there are many things that need to be improved.

In September 2014, tenants were forcibly evicted from one of Brixton’s ‘longest-serving housing co-ops at Carlton Mansions on Coldharbour Lane’. Many visitors expressed their discontent about the fact that the Council said the eviction had to take place so that the building could be refurbished, but it is still empty four years later and ‘was simply left to rot’.