Beyond the white picket fence: the case for intergenerational communities

At last month’s Housing LIN conference in Bristol I shared insights from my Churchill Fellowship on intergenerational and communal housing.

I began with a simple question: who helps you live your life? For many of us, the honest answer is… not that many people. Modern housing has been designed around a very particular idea: the nuclear family and private homeownership. For some people that works. But for many others it creates real challenges: parents raising children in isolation, young people struggling to afford housing, people of all ages experiencing deep loneliness, and communities where neighbours barely know each other breeding stigma and mistrust.

Over the past year I visited 54 intergenerational and community-oriented housing models across the United States and Australia. These included cohousing communities, cooperatives, ecovillages, tiny home villages, home sharing models and supported independent housing. They varied enormously in scale (8 to 250+ residents), governance and affordability, though I intentionally spotlighted those which house low income residents. All these shared something important: they were designed to encourage and enable organic relationships to flourish.

In many of these communities, care isn’t privatised inside a single household, it’s shared across a network of people. Parents describe having a “village-like” support system where childcare is less isolating and more affordable. Older adults talk about ageing in place surrounded by people who know them and notice when they’re not around. Younger residents gain mentors, skills and informal support. Children grow up seeing many different adults as part of their world.

During my visits I became fascinated by the small everyday practices that make these places so different from housing where people simply live in proximity rather than intentionality. I started calling them “neighbourisms.” Neighbourisms are the informal habits of care and interest that strengthen community bonds: someone noticing your light hasn’t been on, a meal train organised when you’re sick, kids moving freely between homes, a neighbour fixing a bike, a lift to the hospital. These things are rarely written into policy, but they are the bedrock of a resilient society.

Housing, in this sense, can be much more than shelter. It can be social infrastructure and a cornerstone of prevention.

Beyond the White Picket Fence: A Companion for Intergenerational Communal Housing  (opens new window)explores these communities including case studies, lessons on how communities navigate conflict, and ten opportunity areas for the UK. I was also delighted to feed into the new inquiry report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People on creating intergenerational communities, and will continue doing advocacy on this topic (opens new window), tackling the primacy of one nuclear way of housing (the white picket fence). Instead of seeing more connected homes and neighbourhoods as niche, we should start mobilising the policy, design and community leadership needed to make them possible at scale, considering social connection as a central responsibility and opportunity of housing design.

When we design housing with relationships in mind, we don’t just change where people live, we change how people live.

---

We were delighted to welcome Savannah to our Annual Conference, Shaping Homes for Health, Independence and Connection, held in Bristol in March 2026. To read the full conference debrief, click here.

For more information on Intergenerational Housing, visit our deidcated pages here.

You may also be interested in the report from the year-long APPG Inquiry into Creating Intergenerational Communities, commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People, for which we were pleased to serve as the secretariat. View the report here.