South Wales Community Led Housing

South Wales community sweetness

One of our coop members happened to be on a short break cat sitting in South Wales which also happens to be a complete hive of community led activity!

Down to Earth is a sustainable community led architects and community building organisation based in Swansea. The eco Pennard family homes were built by their community groups for Beacon Housing Association (former Coastal Housing merged with Rhondda Housing Association Wales)

If you happen to know someone from the area, chances are they know someone. Lucky for us, we did, and were shown around by Ian. He used to live in Golem Housing Coop and happened to work with Down to Earth on building projects for 8 years as a community build facilitator, including the Pennard family homes project above! He talked us through the stages of the build of the houses. Over the course of the 9 month build, he would facilitate 1 community build workshop per week with different groups from the local area incl youth, unskilled, refugee orgs.

He also took us on a tour to an off grid self-build community where he has helped build tiny homes, and introduced us to the architect of Pennard who lives there in her own self-built home with her partner and child. This was quite different to the housing association standard, they used actual trees as columns for their mezzanine. Their place was small but had quite high ceilings and sky lights and just lots of nice thoughtful design that made it a pleasurable space to be in. Tasha has been involved in projects of various scales over the years. She was also part of a CLT, which unfortunately recently folded.

Ian also introduced us to one of the founding Golem Housing Coop members. Their first house was bought with only loanstock via Radical Routes, family, friends and local community. It was a group of queer folks who ate together once a week and decided they wanted to live together as a community. After some time, they found a 2nd home and have capped their coop at 12 people. Radical Routes of Wales Cwmpus send people to see Golem as an example of a coop that was founded independently (without having to partner for funding).

A number of the people involved in Down To Earth also worked in the village of the cat sit - Treherbert with Welcome to Our Woods - Rhondda Skyline Project - a forest stewardship training and timber mill yard, CropCycle Community Garden, and Precious Polymers plastic recycling and 3D printing plant. All these community groups work in close proximity and provide the highest level of employment in the village.

Welcome to Our Woods is also a CLT and brought an old library into community ownership as its first CLT asset in Treherbert in 2019.

They are now working on a brownfield site for 8 social rent homes. Like us, they’ve been looking at partnering with a housing association to get funding, but ultimately it means the housing association owns the homes, not the CLT, so the homes will only ever be as secure as the housing association wishes to be. Once again, a chance meeting and finding out they’re pretty much at the same stage as us. We've taken their details and plans to keep in touch and offer support to each other where we can. Because that's what we do.