Inter-generational Housing Solidarity: Who? Why? How?

This framework makes it easier to understand and build IGHS

Housing is often treated as a technical problem: build more homes, reform planning, improve access to mortgages, increase affordability. These debates matter, but they rarely ask a more fundamental question: what kinds of relationships does housing make possible?

For years my research has explored how people create alternatives when existing institutions fail to meet their needs. From social movements to creative pedagogies and collaborative housing, I have been interested in people, practices and processes that are not just responding to crises but actively experimenting with different ways of living, learning and organising together.

This work has led me to develop a new concept: Intergenerational Housing Solidarity (IGHS), based on my long-term research with student housing co-operators and their supporters in the UK, Europe and North America. My recent article in Housing, Theory and Society introduces IGHS as a framework for understanding how people from different generations can work together to create more equitable, democratic and sustainable housing futures.

Importantly, this is not simply another way of talking about inter-generational support. Much of the existing literature focuses on families: parents helping children onto the housing ladder through financial transfers or inheritance. While these relationships remain important, they tell only part of the story. Across the UK and elsewhere, people are developing collective responses to housing insecurity and crises that extend well beyond the family. Student and regular housing co-operatives, community-led housing initiatives and other urban commons projects demonstrate that housing solidarity is being built through shared purpose, democratic governance and mutual care. This shift from intra-family support to inter-generational solidarity opens up new possibilities.

A Framework for Alternative Housing Futures

The IGHS framework has six interconnected dimensions through which inter-generational solidarity is created: material, spatial, relational, institutional, subjective and resource-based.

1. Material solidarity is grounded in the physical infrastructure of houses. It pays explicit attention to how material conditions, including the design, form and ownership of buildings, shape the possibilities for place-based IGHS. Material possibilities are often contested, based on risk perceptions around young people, dependency on property and finance markets and complex technical processes, all of which can constrain IGHS through complicated, time-consuming and difficult deliberations.

2. Spatial solidarity refers to the multi-scalar institutions and networks that enable IGHS. It ranges from neighbourhoods, city and regional networks to national and international organizations. Working successfully across these scales requires careful negotiations of power and knowledge differentials.

3. Relational solidarity are the interdependencies that generate and sustain solidarity. Whether they are personal or political, intimate or institutional, relations need to be actively built and maintained and show the dynamic and contested character of IGHS.

4. Institutional solidarity encompasses the governance processes and organizational policies that structure solidarity. Institutional mechanisms, which can be formal and informal, enable IGHS to function and require ongoing attention to differences in values and active commitments to address these.

5. Subjective solidarity includes the identities, values and visions of solidarity practitioners. This dimension often requires participants to negotiate assumptions about age, expertise, world views and motivations. When working across generational differences, IGHS can cultivate new collective subjectivities that acknowledge mutual interdependence.

6. Resource solidarity contains the financial, social and human capitals necessary for solidarity to take place. IGHS must address existing resource inequities between generations, to understand who can participate in solidarity work, under what conditions and at what cost. Resource discussions also reveal IGHS’s ambiguity, when solidarity is entangled in market logics, becomes formalized in fees or institutionalized in support mechanisms.

Together, these six dimensions provide a way of understanding housing as more than bricks and mortar. They reveal how solidarity is produced through the interaction of resources, relationships, institutions and shared values, offering IGHS as a practical framework for reimagining housing as a foundation for more democratic, caring and sustainable communities.

The IGHS framework also shows that solidarity does not just emerge naturally from pre-existing commonalities, but is a political practice forged across differences that creates new subjectivities, relationships and spaces for collaboration. My ethnographic material shows how young co-operators and their older supporters are actively negotiating and maintaining housing solidarity. In the process they overcome difficulties and disagreements in their shared struggle to create alternatives to unaffordable financialized housing.

A Platform for Collaborative Action

When many of our existing systems lead to competition between generations, reinforce individual home ownership and separate housing from wider questions of community and wellbeing, IGHS suggests another possibility: that housing can become a platform for collaboration rather than competition, and that younger and older generations have much to gain by creating new forms of collective life together. Such collaboration is difficult and demands reciprocity and care, but my research on the practical experiences of those already building alternatives shows that it is possible.

Practically, the IGHS framework offers actionable insights for cooperative practitioners, policy-makers and housing advocates. Its findings highlight strategies for overcoming resource scarcity, sustaining democratic governance and building alliances across generations and institutions. By framing solidarity as a pragmatic necessity and ethical commitment, IGHS can provide a roadmap for practitioners seeking to grow collaborative housing initiatives that are equitable, sustainable and transformative.

While grounded in cooperative housing, the IGHS framework can also serve organizations in other areas that are trying to think differently and design alternative responses to the complex challenges they are facing. I therefore hope that the IGHS framework proves useful to housing organizations, universities, policymakers, local authorities and community groups seeking new ways to think about housing, inter-generational relationships and collective futures. If these ideas resonate with your work, I'd be delighted to continue the conversation. You can contact me through LinkedIn, this website or email creativeuniversities21@gmail.com.