It’s being promoted as the new answer to the housing crisis for young, urban professionals - and it is about to arrive in a big way in Bristol. It’s called ‘co-living’, and within a year or two could be the accommodation model for hundreds of people in Bristol city centre, with potentially thousands of people living this way by the end of the decade.
But what exactly is 'co-living', and is it the future of living in the middle of the city?
Those proposing to build it say it is providing what young, single people want in the mid-2020s, but others say they fear it is a new way for developers to make huge profits by cramming even more people into even smaller living spaces.
It’s a model of living that has been around for a few years in the United States, and arrived in London either side of the Covid pandemic, with developments popping up in Manchester too since then. Now it’s coming here - two major developments in Bristol have been proposed this year, with one already being considered by planning officers at City Hall.
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The first is on the site of what is now the NCP Rupert Street car park. That car park would be demolished and in its place a collection of different tall buildings - and a new car park - would be built. As well as the expected student accommodation - for 328 students - one of the buildings will be for ‘co-living’, with 249 people living in a building up to 20 storeys high.
That plan has been submitted to Bristol City Council for approval, and a decision is pending. A little further back on the planning conveyor belt is a plan for a site just up the same road, next to the Bearpit. There, developers want to demolish the Premier Inn between the bus station and the Bearpit roundabout, and build a series of tall buildings which would house 445 students in one 28-storey block, and another 18-storey block with ‘co-living’ accommodation for 136 people.
So what is co-Living?
Essentially it’s a new kind of residential living set-up - a kind of cross between a shared house, a studio flat and student accommodation. People have one en-suite room, which may or may not have its own kitchen facilities, and then are grouped together in a larger unit or floor with between six and 12 other rooms that then share communal dining or lounge or kitchen areas - much like the PBSAs or purpose-built student accommodation that is being built all over Bristol at the moment.
‘Co-living’ goes a bit further, however. As well as the communal facilities within one shared apartment, the blocks that have been built in London will typically have larger shared facilities for everyone living in the building - a gym, cinema room, bar, roof terrace, work spaces, cafes.
The key selling point for those proposing this as the next way of living for urban professionals is that people pay one fee for all of that - whereas in a self-contained apartment or in a shared house out in the Victorian suburbs, they will be paying their own council tax, electricity bills, wifi, gym membership, and so on.
But those urging caution say the private spaces people will live in are too small to be healthy, and if the Covid lockdown taught us anything, it was that people need access to good quality outside spaces, and it’s potentially damaging to mental health to live in one small room. There are also concerns over the battlegrounds surrounding ‘co-Living’ accommodation’s minimum standards, and whether Bristol’s planning authority is sufficiently prepared for the fight to maintain those standards.
Oliver d’Erlanger is the senior development manager at Olympian Homes, the company proposing a ‘co-Living’ project at the Bearpit. “Co-Living is a new community-led way of living in fully-serviced, purpose-built housing with high quality shared spaces for residents,” he said. “The co-living model aims to bring like-minded people together and foster a stronger sense of community than traditional rental tenures.
“Co-Living also offers much more flexible tenancy agreements and a variety of contract lengths to suit different customers, usually starting at a minimum tenancy of three months. Bills are fully included within the rent, meaning no additional or fluctuating costs each month, making this way of living both more convenient and secure, particularly useful for young professionals and key workers seeking to live and work in city centre locations.
“When compared to renting a 1-bedroom apartment in the same area, a co-living unit is typically 20 per cent more affordable,” he added.
Olympian’s development at the Bearpit would include a kitchen in each room, although that isn’t necessarily the case in other developments. “In co-living developments each resident has their own private studio apartment equipped with an individual kitchen and high-quality furnishings,” Mr d’Erlanger added. “The facilities would usually also include shared amenity spaces, gym, lounge, co-working spaces, cinema and private dining areas.
“By including some of these facilities for each floor, it encourages the creation of smaller floor-by-floor communities throughout a building, as well as the shared spaces allowing larger social events. All of these spaces are fully serviced by an experienced onsite management team,” he added.
While this is all pretty new for the UK, Bristol is seen as a place where the conditions are right for the growth of ‘co-living’. There’s a large student population well-used to living in this sort of accommodation in existing PBSAs, there’s a large population of young people whose wages have not kept pace with the spiralling rents of traditional shared houses, flats and apartments in the city, and there’s a large number of keyworkers, priced out of the housing market.
Developers say creating ‘co-living’ accommodation is an answer to the question posed by the phenomenon which has seen people wanting to live in city centre apartments like at Castle Park View having to prove they earn almost £40,000 to even be considered for a rented one-bed flat there.
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According to Mr d’Erlanger, ‘co-living’ is popular where it has already been built. “Whilst in the UK market this concept remains in its relative infancy, co-living has become incredibly popular among in large US cities and across Europe, especially with young people being increasingly priced out of the traditional rental market.
“Along with the attractive affordability aspect, residents value the sense of community and collaboration where social and professional networking is made easy. This is proving particularly important with the rise of remote working. Equally, the model makes sustainable living much more achievable for a generation driven by such concerns – commute times are reduced or removed and these buildings can produce only a third of the emissions of traditional households,” he added.
“In Bristol, rents have risen by 52% whilst wages have only risen by 24%. Good quality rental stock in the city is becoming increasingly difficult to attain for many people as demand for quality homes in close proximity to places of work is far outweighing supply.
“The number of applications to convert homes into HMOs in Bristol continues to rise, which has decreased the supply of suitable family homes in the city. Co-living schemes will therefore help to lessen the current pressures on Bristol’s rental market and provide housing more suitable, particularly for young professionals and key workers, freeing up quality family housing. The co-living model offers residents rent inclusive of utility bills, wi-fi and council tax providing added financial security and convenience, especially in the current environment,” he added.
What are the downsides?
It’s not surprising that those proposing ‘co-living’ say it is the answer to a lot of the different problems caused by the crisis of affordability of homes in Bristol, especially in the city centre. Olympian and the other major property developers, and the consultants, designers, agencies and management firms stand to create a new way to make money from the human need for people to have somewhere to live.
There are some issues notes of caution, however. Urbaburble is a Scottish housing and planning expert YouTuber who explores the world of housing and planning , with expert assessments of issues. His video looking at the pros and cons of ‘co-living’ concluded by saying that, in his view, ‘co-living’ should only be a niche phenomenon, not a large-scale answer to the housing crisis.
He warned cities and their city leaders could well be tempted by developers saying they have found a new way to house large numbers of young people. “Authorities aiming to develop compact city models based on lower car dependency might see co-living as a useful means of growing the city centre’s population, and boosting densities,” he said.
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“Cities can improve their competitive advantage by retaining a large cohort of younger workers within an otherwise ageing workforce, and this demographic can boost a city’s night-time economy still recovering from Covid,” he added.
But the main issue with ‘co-living’ is that people are being asked to live, or told they can only afford to live, in smaller and smaller spaces. A typical living area, the only private space a resident of a ‘co-living’ block has, will only be around 20 square metres. That will have a bed, bathroom, perhaps a small and basic kitchen facility. The national standard for a home for one person is 37sqm.
Urbaburble says this affects people’s mental health. “There are loads of videos showing architect-designed units around this size and whilst they all show it’s technically feasible, none of them demonstrate the desirability of micro-living,” he said.
Developers say having high-quality communal shared spaces and amenities off-sets the small individual rooms. “With the best will in the world, no amount of shared amenity will turn co-living development into a permanent housing solution,” said Urbaburble, who pointed to the fact that, because of this, many planning authorities in London have limited the length of time someone can live in a ‘co-living’ block to 12 months.
“So a key element of planning consent is that tenancies need to be time-limited. This is typically of 3-12 months, and is justified by planning authorities on health and wellbeing concerns. And of course, this creates an obvious paradox - with a continual churn of residents due to the inadequacy of space provision, the claim of supporting communal living and of community building begins to ring a little hollow,” he added.
What will the arguments in Bristol be?
While the detailed plans for Olympian’s ‘co-living’ accommodation at the Bearpit aren’t yet available, as they will be in the detailed planning application, the detailed plans for the Rupert Street car park site are, and the proposal report from Pegasus Group sets out the battle lines that could well be fought between councillors and developers over the ‘Co-living’ invasion of Bristol.
The smallest ‘Co-living’ private spaces at the Rupert Street block will be just 19sqm - just over half the minimum national policy requirement of 37sqm. Pegasus have told Bristol City Council if it wants ‘co-living’ to arrive in Bristol, it will have to lower the city's minimum standards of how small someone’s home is allowed to be.
In the fine print of its planning application, Pegasus argue that, even when you add up all the size of all the communal amenities and divide by the number of people living there, and add that to the size of each individual room, Bristol City Council’s minimum requirements of 37sqm per home is too big.
“The average size of a co- living room within the proposed development is 19.8 sqm Therefore, using the council’s guidance, the requirement would be 17.2 sqm of communal floorspace required per person, for that resident. Clearly this is excessive, and beyond what any purpose- built co- living accommodation can reasonably provide,” the Pegasus report said.
The city council’s standards also say each home has to have 5sqm of outside space too. “While this might be an appropriate amount for a self- contained flat," argued Pegasus, "it is excessive for shared living accommodation and beyond what could reasonably be delivered. It is considered that the 1.6 sqm per resident amount provided is acceptable,” before adding that in London, new guidance to facilitate more ‘Co-Living’ spaces has set the bar even lower, at 1sqm per resident.
The developers at Rupert Street are arguing every point too, in an attempt to lower Bristol City Council’s existing standards.
The City Hall planners say that, when someone proposing a shared living development adds up the communal space, they can only include the kind of things associated with domestic living - like kitchens, lounges, dining rooms and laundry or utility rooms - and the kind of extras like gyms and cinemas that are the big selling point of ‘co-living’ blocks are pointedly excluded.
Once again, in its application, Pegasus told Bristol’s planners they need to be more like London’s, and be more flexible. “The gyms and cinema rooms provided with the proposed development are high quality and not for use by the public – there is no logical reason why they should be discounted; and in London, under the mayor’s planning guidance, such facilities are regarded as communal space,” the Pegasus report added.
So Pegasus’ plans for Rupert Street do not, it seems, meet Bristol’s minimum standards for size of accommodation, and the developers are arguing that Bristol should lower those standards to open the doors for large-scale ‘co-living’.
Urbaburble said council planners should be cautious, warning that in other cities, developers have ‘double-counted’ the kind of amenities like gyms and bars, saying they are both shared spaces for the residents, and benefits for the wider city.
What about the cost?
One of the biggest players in Bristol’s large-scale property development world is Savills. In a recent Savills report looking at the co-living developments becoming established in London, they noted that way more than half the residents there were under 30, although a handful are over 60 - so it’s not exclusively for young people.
Savills’ report also outlined the theoretical finances. They said if a typical studio flat in a ‘built-to-rent’ apartment building like the ones being built in Bristol city centre and Bedminster, is £1,300 for a studio flat, the actual total cost of living there is £1,633, when council tax, utility bills, broadband, TV licence and gym membership is factored in.
That contrasts with roughly the same - £1,306 - monthly rent for a ‘Co-living’ unit, with all those extras thrown in, albeit in an even smaller space, up to half the overall size, than that studio apartment.
At the moment, other cities like Manchester and Sheffield are a step ahead of Bristol in embracing the ‘co-living’ phenomenon. There are two mega-blocks currently under construction in Manchester, one for 1,676 rooms and another for 1,518 rooms in Manchester city centre, and another of 1,230 in Sheffield, making Bristol’s two smaller developments proposed seem tiny by comparison.
But while developers obviously see this as something Bristol needs, is it something people struggling to get a room in a shared house to rent, or a studio flat, actually want?
“What’s in it for residents?” asked Urbaburble. “To be fair, there are some potential advantages. All basic needs are met and are covered by a single payment arrangement, and for those not ready to settle down in one location, and like city centre living, co-living offers flexibility. But does it represent good value for money?
“Realistically we are talking about one step up from student accommodation. Sitting in a niche between better amenities than a shared house, and cheaper than a private rental. Is this what young professionals now have to settle for?” he added.
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