This study is one component of a project on building solutions that will address some of the barriers to make our building stock, both new build and retrofit, perform better for the needs of older people.
This component focuses on the increasing demand for affordable, secure rental housing among older people and the limited delivery of rental and affordable housing to older people. This component of the Building Solutions Project constitutes a design experiment which sought to establish whether the yield of shared rental could be increased while providing less integrated and more homelike building envelopes which might be adaptable to change in use over time. It looked to do so on a site smaller than those typically being sought for Abbeyfield and shared rental sites. Indeed, it explores the extent to which contiguous but separately titled sites might provide the benefits of communal living while taking a precautionary approach which would allow the buildings on each site (with their own cooking and dining nodes) to be decoupled functionally if required in the future. Those outcomes were sought along with an attempt to increase the yield and provide flexibility in terms of both building and tenanting as well as provide a domestic low-rise typology that would not overwhelm neighbours or generate issues of mobility, access and safety for residents. That is, a single storey structure. This component has three substantive outputs: the first is a set of concept plans which have been developed to suit a specific site, but which can be transferrable to other sites; an analysis of the yield associated with that concept; and an analysis of construction costs. The latter is in a subsequent report. This report focuses on the yield associated with the concept design. The yield has a significant impact on costs, capital requirements and returns which are associated with land consumption.
