The price of living in communal paradise: admin, absentee volunteers and cat sh*t wars

By Sophie Atkinson

Let’s start with a thought experiment. You’re living in a community where voluntary work is essential to the place you’re living in running smoothly — without it, repairs wouldn’t happen, pathways would grow perilously slippery with leaves, administrative problems would surge unattended. But recently about half of these volunteers have just…disengaged. They’re not coming to meetings, they’re not doing the co-ordinated voluntary work the community requires. There could be any number of reasons for this: maybe it’s circumstantial (elderly relatives to care for, a new job, children to ferry to and from school). Maybe they did a stint of volunteering in the past, and made a mistake and got told off at a meeting. Perhaps they have ample time and energy, they just don’t fancy volunteering. For the purposes of the experiment, you cannot force or bribe them. So how do you fire up the non-volunteers and inspire them, so they want to get involved?

This is the crucial question that Katherine Bird, 50, has been asking herself about Homes for Change, Hulme, since last summer. Homes for Change (HfC) is a housing co-operative, part of which sits on top of the cafe-bar Kim’s Kitchen. It’s a rare exhale in a fraught housing market, since securing a flat there means paying well under the market rate. The 75 flats range from one to four bedrooms, although the average flat has two, and one interviewee tells me his two-bed flat costs £300 a month, in total, (some) bills included.

It’s a revelation that leaves me briefly sick with envy because, even close to three decades since the first tenants moved in, HfC still packs a considerable visual punch. The complex wouldn’t look out of place in Barcelona or Berlin, with its flats surrounding a central courtyard of grass and trees. There are spiralling staircases and what used to be a roof garden, although the grass got too soggy for this to be sustainable long-term, so it’s now concrete topped by a huge table where residents sometimes eat or drink together in the summer. There’s plants everywhere, an abandoned chicken coop (the chickens have gone to a “better place” — an organic farm, rather than a euphemism) and there's something rakish about it. It feels, in the best possible way, piratey in places. Heading into Katherine's beautiful, spacious three-bedroom flat, it's hard to believe that she's only paying £410 for the entire flat a month, which includes a standing charge for water and the free broadband available across the building. This, I suppose, is the joy of co-operative living.

When Katherine, a Mill reader, first emails me in September, she writes about her life there with considerable warmth: “It's a community, more like a small village… the opportunity to live here can be life changing.” But she also seems open about the frustrations that such a set-up entails (“But it's also hard work! It's time consuming. We often don't know what we're doing, and we make mistakes.”)

At the moment, the community is embarking on a journey she hopes will put some of those mistakes right. After the last annual general meeting of residents, she’d crunched the numbers and discovered that 44% of the co-op’s members were not doing the minimum voluntary requirement of two hours a month. It’s a requirement that’s asked in good faith, rather than demanded: tenants aren’t ever kicked out for not completing the work. But it’s also the main reason they’re able to keep rents so low, since residents don’t have to pay the salaries of managerial staff. The widespread disengagement means that the work necessary to keep the co-op afloat is falling to fewer residents, something she worries could lead to stress and burnout. Katherine quickly formed a group to investigate what was causing people to step back.

In February, I move into HfC for a few days. I'll be sleeping in Katherine's spare room and sharing her flat with her and her lodger, an architect Andrew. Walking around the balcony-laden complex, and spying a tree heavy with pink blossom, it feels a bit like I’m on holiday. I feel astonishingly lucky to get to spend some time here.

There’s plenty of people on the waiting list for a HfC flat who I know would agree. Moving into this oasis demands considerable patience and a willingness to roll your sleeves up and dig in. To get on the waiting list, you need to become a member of the co-op, which involves attending various meetings and joining a “working group” — one of the volunteer committees responsible for each of the complex’s many needs. There's a group for communications (they run the website and put out a print newsletter), a group for maintenance and so on. 

This means that, while they wait anxiously to reach the top, some of the co-op’s members are spending at least two hours a month volunteering at a building in which they do not actually get to live. HfC’s waitlist runs on a points system — you get 50 points for every six months you spend on it. However, extra points are given to applicants in precarious living situations, whether due to a bad landlord or because they’re currently sofa-surfing. (To avoid people gaming the system, volunteers from the co-op visit applicants at home to fact-check any claims they make.) 

This would be no big deal if applicants could expect to secure a flat within a few months, but these days, the housing crisis and rising rents mean those within the co-op have taken to staying put longer than they used to. Reaching the top of the HfC waiting list generally takes between two to five years. If I was one of these hopefuls, diligently putting in my two hours each month, while someone living in what could be my flat neglects their duties, I imagine I would seethe.

And, in case I’ve too diligently painted a picture of the complex as some kind of Garden of Eden, let me assure you: its residents can also seethe. In the co-op’s earlier days, rent collection was also down to resident volunteers, which caused the sort of tension you might expect. One tenant, Kim, 61, has been at HfC since it opened its doors in 1996 and says her former partner used to be a rent officer. One night they got home to find a rent arrears notice that had been given to a former resident, Giles, fastened to their front door. Well, “fastened” — Giles had drunk a few pints, presumably got hot under the collar about this, and stabbed the notice into the door with a knife as a riposte. Kim seems nonchalant enough about this now — they knew Giles, he didn’t mean any harm, so they laughed it off. Still, she thinks it’s probably for the best that they’ve outsourced this task to a property management company, Shared Habitat. 

I arrive at the co-op on an exciting day; there’s going to be a general meeting in a communal room at the base of the building. I’m reassured that it won’t be like the chaotic meetings of the co-op’s early years in the late 90s, back when decisions were made by consensus and discussions dragged on and on and on until every single person attending agreed with the chosen path. Herman, a 61-year-old tenant who has lived here since the start, describes monthly meetings “where there'd be 30, 40 people plus kiddy winkles and babies in buggies and pets and god knows what” and where kicking off within half an hour of the designated start time was a rare feat. “And then three hours later, you know, the meeting would fall apart because it was last orders at the pub. So it's just a mental way to try and run detailed things.” 

At the end of the meeting, he says, nobody had much clarity on what decisions had been made (or even if a decision had been reached at all), who would carry it out, when or how it would happen. This frustration led to the formation of a committee roughly five years in, a group elected by members who are responsible for pushing administrative tasks forward in between meetings. As many members tell me now, the meetings are now very quick. 

When we talk about speed, then we are effectively talking about one member of the co-op — a man who has arguably done more to reform the place than anyone else living here. That man is Keith, 58. Keith is a godsend to somewhere like HfC: other people might find getting into the nitty-gritty of democratic rule tedious, but his eyes gleam when he gets into granular detail. The co-op’s most active volunteers often have relevant experience from their day jobs: they’ve done project management, like Katherine, or community work, like Kim or Herman, so they’re used to organising groups of people. But only Keith has extensive experience in elections and democracy: he was a member of the Electoral Reform Society's technical committee; he’s counted elections in Manchester for the student unions and even for the Chancellor of the University of Manchester once.

His passion for the admin is hard to convey on the page, suffice it to say, that when I ask interviewees about their favourite memories of the co-op, one talks about great parties, another about the time Manchester International Festival visits, another cites a naming ceremony for a child. Keith is the only person to answer that question with a memory of a meeting. He cites the first time he chaired a general meeting: “I think people were impressed because I was good at keeping control of the meeting and I managed to shut one of the most loquacious persons up.” How did he do that? “I told him time was up. I think he was just so shocked that he just shut up, basically.”

Decisions at general meetings are now decided by a majority vote. It’s inevitably a faster system than trying to convince every last person but, as I take my place on a plastic seat in a brightly lit room, I wonder how brief it will actually be. After all, tonight’s meeting has a big change on the agenda. As Katherine informed me earlier, the committee is proposing that the co-op adopt a Code of Conduct, so that volunteers have a clear idea of the sort of behaviour expected from them.

It’s half six when Keith and Katherine, who sit at the front of the room behind a table, get things going. The rest of us are in rows of plastic chairs before them and there must be around 20 people in the room. Immediately, I’m struck by how legalistic the language deployed in the meeting is. Parliamentary, almost. When the new code is proposed, a woman raises her hand — she wants to ask something. Keith points out that it’s the wrong moment, according to their protocol, for questions. Later, a different resident’s criticism (“Why do we need more rules?”) is effectively a question, and she protests: if the critical speaker can ask a question, why can’t she? At a certain point someone tries to move on to a different subject, but they’re corrected — there’s a logical order in which we move through topics and they’ve jumped ahead. Eventually, there’s a vote on the code of conduct and it passes overwhelmingly. I check my watch as the meeting comes to a close. Just eleven minutes have passed. 

I feel sort of dazed: I’ve drunk several gallons of coffee throughout the day and I’ve been energetically scribbling notes, but nonetheless found proceedings hard to follow. It turns out I’m not the only one. Later, I’ll find out that a 40-year-old tenant named Praveen supported a neurodivergent tenant by going with her to the same meeting to check that she understood everything. Apparently, when Praveen inquired, this tenant revealed that she didn’t understand the outcome of the vote “because the meeting was so fast and the language was so formal”. Praveen had to walk her through it.

After the meeting, I chat to Sylvester, a nursing student from Seville who’s been living in HfC since 2008. Sylvester has a more unfiltered demeanour than some of my other interviewees — while he concedes living in a place where the residents manage the building was attractive, he’s quick to tell me that ultimately, the affordability was the main draw for him. 

When we talk about the meeting, it turns out that Sylvester had a question about the Code of Conduct that he didn’t get to ask. It wasn’t that he felt he couldn’t, he explains, but it can be difficult to find a moment to given how fast things move and when there are strict rules on when questions are permitted. “Keith is very by the book,” he points out, “so the rules gotta be observed all the time.” He had wanted to know what would happen if somebody didn’t follow the Code of Conduct — would there be any repercussions? His point being, if not, “this is just nothing then. It’s only a guideline. You know?” When I press him on why he didn’t speak up, he shrugs — it wouldn’t have made much difference, the code of conduct was going to get voted through anyway.

Sylvester currently volunteers in the gardening group, but concedes that there have been periods where he didn’t do his part. Sometimes he just didn’t feel like it, he says. Plus, in the past, he’s made proposals for how things should be and those proposals weren’t adopted, which left him with a sense that there’s only a “facade of democracy” at HfC. 

He’s not stupid, he insists, he can see what’s going on. “For the important decisions that involve money and the [housing provider who own the building] Guinness Trust and stuff like that, it's always the same people.” But on the other hand, he concedes, these select few spend a lot of time on this work and he enjoys the fruits of their labour. Perhaps he shouldn’t complain — at the end of the day, he doesn’t have the same time to contribute that they do. He’s also fairly sure that, if he wanted a spot on the committee, he could have it. Perhaps democracy — like perfection — is one of those ideals we must continually strive for, knowing we can never entirely reach it in this lifetime. “Power, favouritisms, whether somebody likes somebody or not, relationships. It’s part of the human condition.”

During my time at the co-op, I ask everyone I meet why they think some members are failing to volunteer and hear an encyclopaedia of possible reasons. Kim, for example, thinks when it comes to keep people in line, the co-op has “tended to do more stick than carrot — well, not to do stick, but to say stick. ‘God, I’m running ragged and you’re doing nothing.’” Independently of her, Herman seconds the stick/carrot notion — “I will say, carrot and stick, the carrot's not there either. It's too difficult to get involved. My thing has always been, it should be less hassle to do stuff than it is to avoid doing it. But we never really achieved that.”  

Katherine, meanwhile, suspects some people who would otherwise be chipping in have had a bad experience and been put off: “They've not felt like they've been valued or they've not felt that their needs have been met.” Another resident, who asked to be cited anonymously, thought — amongst other reasons — that some might dread the confrontation, discussion, and long meetings they fear taking part will involve. Plus, they point out, there are those with “physical/caring/scheduling limitations to being there in person”. 

Another anonymous contributor suggests that the co-op’s decades of history mean that those who have been there for a while might remember mistakes a person had made long ago — say, in the 90s — and then that person might feel a bit vilified and put off from coming to meetings. This initially sounds like a point that could be applied more generally, though this interviewee (who wasn’t there in the 90s), then cites a suspiciously specific-sounding example: “Some people hate other people here, like actually hate them, and they make it obvious they hate them. Which is so unprofessional, because if somebody, for example, sold on some parts, like copper pipes and stuff from the flat that obviously belonged to the co-op because they had a drug dependency, that’s historic. So it’s professional to move on from that.” 

Reputational hangovers from that copper pipe you nicked in the 90s aside — is disengagement as big a problem as it first seems? On my second morning there, I turn left out of Katherine’s and go a few steps to Kim’s for a cup of tea and she explains why she doesn’t think the 44% figure does the co-op justice. There are people who contribute, not by volunteering, but by providing “social fabric”. For example: there’s a couple who are no longer together, but still live at HfC. One, for reasons of severe dyslexia, hasn’t had a great deal to do with the formal structures. “But I would say they have been integral to sustaining this place as a community.” They would do anything for anyone and they’re practical: if you needed your lock fixing, they would do it.

An anonymous contributor insists there are plenty of people contributing by “caring for each others' animals, doing shopping when someone is unwell, shifting furniture for people, delivering parcels, lending food and tools, managing shared resources like bike sheds”. This may not be recognised by the co-op as official voluntary work, but it’s arguably in the same spirit as the working groups.

In general, this warmth is the main thing I notice as I move around Homes for Change. Praveen describes moving in and having “a ready-made set of friendly neighbours”: before she even had a kettle, people would come over and bring a flask of boiled water and herbal teas. Nickie, a 70-year-old resident, tells me about other neighbours getting the shopping in for one another. “It’s this lovely organic community when it works well,” she says. “And that far outweighs any disadvantages, as far as I'm concerned. We root for each other.”

When I chat to Herman about the question of disengagement, he raises a question that nobody else has: does the co-op actually need more work from its volunteers? There are 85 members and, if everyone did their hours, this would add up to 170 hours of work each month. The co-op has to employ professionals for some work — they’re not covered by insurance to hike up ladders and do repairs themselves. So is there really 170 hours’ worth of administration and management work that needs doing? Probably not, Herman says. Then he pauses to reconsider: “But then you don't want to get into a spiral of doom where there's less and less people doing stuff and things don't get done, [there’s] reputational damage, we get done by the social housing regulator, it becomes a vicious downward spiral.” 

I think this is the crux of the matter, really. The need for engagement is less about the granular detail — X number of people carrying out Y hours of work per month — and more about sustaining a sense of community. Making sure that people still get on, really. Despite hearing about all the wonderful things residents do for each other, I also hear a fair amount about “the cat shit wars” while I’m there — though only one person uses this specific term, multiple interviewees cite rocketing tension over cat faeces. 

Apparently this is a topic that flares up every six months or so. On the co-op Facebook group, someone has been posting photos of another resident’s cat, which they insist keeps going to the toilet outside their flat. They’ve apparently complained that if it happens again, they’re going to post the cat poo through the owner’s letterbox. As one anonymous interviewee puts it: “It was just really inappropriate, like calm down, why are you criminally profiling a cat? It didn’t mean to crap outside your door. So, yeah, people can get a bit daft.” 

But, as Sylvester might argue, perhaps occasional friction like this is just part of living with other people. Otherwise, the co-op continues to do something amazing: helping people lead more free and stable lives than they would outside of social housing. Praveen, who has fibromyalgia, previously had to live with her parents because her condition meant she would occasionally need to take a few months off work. Moving into the co-op has, in her opinion, improved her relationship with her mum, who she thinks is now a lot more respectful to her. 

For Kim, HfC gave her the freedom to pursue a less work-centric existence — her father gave his whole life to his career before dying of lung disease just 18 months after retirement, which made her determined to avoid such a fate. “I needed that freedom to do a lot of what I wanted to do and how I did it. And that one way of doing that was to spend less, quite simply.” Sometimes the advantage HfC gives tenants can be distilled more simply. As Eddie, who’s lived there 21 years, puts it: “I’ve never had to worry about my landlord being a twat. I am my own landlord, sort of.”

For Charlie Baker, the architectural designer who first started HfC, this is self-evidently worth whatever squabbles over undone gardening or feline toilet habits that living there might entail. “It would be an awfully Stepford Wives kind of place if everyone did agree,” he says. The real HfC is something far better: a building block for a “sociable, civilised, robust city, basically”. The continued success of the project has only become more precious in the decades since the first tenants moved in — where once there were “40 odd” co-ops like it in Greater Manchester, now there’s only a handful of co-ops left. “Too few people know that it's an option to be able to stand up and demand it."

Like any shared living situation, they have their problems. It’s to their credit that residents who require more of their neighbours than others are supported so well. Over the course of my reporting, I hear about a resident at HfC who has addiction issues and, separately to this, a serious health problem. They have fared far better here than they would at a normal block of flats, Kim suggests, largely because they know they can knock on a neighbour’s door. “I’ve been in that situation, other neighbours have, where you call an ambulance and stay with [them] in your home and comfort [them] and make sure [they’re] okay.” This grace and charity — and the achievement of keeping someone alive despite the odds stacked against them — is the obvious upside of Home for Change’s permissive culture. In a stricter co-op, where failing to volunteer led to someone being disciplined or even forced out, this person might be long gone. 

The best possible journalism problem to have: too much good material. On Wednesday, we’ll publish my conversation with the man who started Homes for Change Hulme, architectural designer Charlie Baker. We went deep into his nine-year struggle to make HfC a reality — how the Hulme Crescents played into the design of the building and why, in its early days, HfC was known by local midwives as “the baby factory”. This will be sent to paying members only. If you’d like to read it, please consider hitting the button above to subscribe.