LILAC: Low Impact Living Affordable Community

LILAC began in 2006 with a group of Leeds residents who wanted to build their own homes and live differently. The idea was urban from the start - deliberately so, close enough to the city that people could travel to work without cars. After years of research, planning and fundraising, they established LILAC Mutual Home Ownership Society Ltd as a registered co-operative in 2009. Construction began in 2012. First residents moved in May 2013.

The site is a former primary school in Bramley, west Leeds. Twenty homes: a mix of one and two-bed flats and three and four-bed houses, and a Common House at the centre. Designed by White Design architects. Built using ModCell - prefabricated panels of timber frame packed with straw bale, assembled offsite in a temporary flying factory and joined on site. External walls in lime render. Triple-glazed windows. MVHR ventilation. Solar thermal panels and a 1.25kw solar PV array, with an additional 4kw on the Common House. A sustainable urban drainage system feeds a central pond.

Residents helped build it - collectively adding the straw bale insulation during construction. The choice of straw was deliberate: renewable, locally sourced, high-insulating, and a material that allowed the community to be physically involved in making where they would live.

And the smell of straw is very present. It permeates the interior of each home and gives a sense of peace and security - imagine a hi-tech version of a haystack where something primal tickles the nostrils and the brain and says: you belong here.

Financed through members’ invested capital, a long-term mortgage from ethical bank Triodos, and a £420,000 government grant from the Homes and Communities Agency’s Low Carbon Investment Fund - specifically to pilot ModCell straw construction at residential scale.

The Mutual Home Ownership Model

LILAC were the first co-operative in the UK to use the Mutual Home Ownership (MHO) model. Members pay 35% of their net monthly household income. That payment covers a house charge - maintenance, insurance - with the remainder building equity in the co-operative over time.

Equity units are indexed to wage inflation at three-quarters rate - not to the property market. In the thirteen years since LILAC opened, local house prices have risen roughly 60%. Private rental in the area has gone up over 80%. LILAC’s equity units have risen around 23%. The gap between those numbers is structural, and intentional: the place becomes relatively cheaper over time, not more expensive.

Members never own the property. They own equity in the co-op and take a portion of it on leaving. The land stays in trust. Affordability is locked in permanently for whoever comes next.

The Common House

The Common House is at the centre of the site - physically and otherwise. Shared kitchen and dining room, laundry, meeting rooms, a workshop with power tools and workbench, office, guest rooms, play area. Outside: communal gardens, allotments, a pocket park that the wider neighbourhood uses too. Around eight or nine cars between twenty households. Five washing machines. Two lawnmowers. The maths of sharing is simple and the results are not abstract.

Meals together happen at least once a week, often two or three times. The dining room and kitchen were squeezed at the build stage to keep costs down - there is ongoing discussion about whether to extend both. That decision, when it comes, will go to all-member consensus.

Every month: a Tend and Mend day. Residents are expected to show up. Where they can, they maintain the place themselves, calling in contractors when they can’t.

Governance runs close to sociocracy. Major decisions - anything that touches vision and values, or exceeds a team’s delegated budget - go to general all-member meetings. Consensus is the aim. If it cannot be reached after three meetings, a majority vote becomes available. That option has never been used. Day-to-day decisions sit with task teams: maintenance, finance, process, landscape, secretariat, Common House, food. Each sends a spokesperson to the Hub - an oversight body that functions closest to a board, without quite being one.

Living Here

Ten years in, the place feels established. The pioneer energy of the early years - when residents were doing something genuinely unprecedented in this country - has settled into something closer to ordinary life: kids growing, careers changing, a safe gaze towards the future. This is what the place communicates. Safety, stability, a sense of home and warmth.

The financial model does something structural to the community as well as to the economics. Because members cannot sell at market rate, there is no incentive to treat the place as an investment. Because there is one collective mortgage, there is a shared stake in making it work. Co-housing projects that operate on individual market ownership have found, in some cases, that units end up in private landlord hands and the community character quietly disappears. At LILAC that route is closed.

COVID made something else visible - the support between residents during lockdown, navigating different vulnerabilities and risk tolerances across twenty households, showed what the intergenerational structure of the place actually meant when it was under pressure. It held.

A LILAC household produces around half the waste of an average UK household: 377kg compared to 755kg nationally. Bulk food purchasing from ethical suppliers, community composting, on-site food growing. The project was included in a UN report as an example of sustainable development goals in architectural practice.

Since 2015, Leeds Community Homes - co-founded by LILAC and Canopy - has supported community-led housing development across Leeds. Chapeltown Cohousing (ChaCo), the second cohousing project in the city, drew directly on LILAC’s design and decision-making approach. Its chair has said ChaCo would not have happened without LILAC having gone first.

Building costs have nearly tripled since LILAC was completed. Land prices have followed. The financial conditions that made it possible - cheap post-crash land, an ethical mortgage, a government pilot grant - have not returned. A group starting from scratch now would face a very different set of conditions. Paul Chatterton, who co-founded the project and still lives here, is clear-eyed about this. The future he was dreaming of was hundreds of projects like this one across the country. There are thirty, maybe. Not enough points on the map yet.

Further reading

Paul Chatterton, co-founder and resident, is Professor of Urban Futures at the University of Leeds. His book Low Impact Living: A Field Guide to Ecological, Affordable Community Building (Routledge, 2015) documents the LILAC process in full. His most recent book, How to Save the City (Agenda Publishing, 2023), extends the argument into urban climate action.

Chapeltown Cohousing (ChaCo): 29 homes on a hectare of former council land in Chapeltown, Leeds. Fully occupied. Built to AECB standard.

Leeds Community Homes, co-founded by LILAC and Canopy in 2015, supports community-led housing across the city.