House Party Round-up: Session One - What if Uber Did Housing?

Over the next week - we'll be rounding up the main sessions we curated at this years House Party.

There were loads of ideas and some brilliant concepts produced over the two days.

Now is time for the difficult part. We are taking the spirit of the concepts and presenting them back via a series of slideshares. Many of them present very different options for the future of housing.

Once they are all published we'll be asking our network what options (if any) we want to explore.

Today: What if Uber did Housing.

The discussion had some far-reaching suggestions:

  • Housing associations should stop trying to do everything and become much more specialist. If there are only a handful of decent repairs services why don’t we scale them rather than try to replicate them? This would leave organisations that are excellent at development or community engagement to focus on what they are best at.
  • Reimagining choice-based lettings as one platform: not just to obtain a social home but to procure and trade services within the home and community.
  • Setting a 10-year trajectory for housing associations not to exist in their current form. They could be replaced with co-operatives – not as we presently know them but focused on sharing resources and assets in a digital as well as local space.

We decided we didn't want an Uber. The original values and purpose of housing associations must remain in our minds.

But we agreed unless we created the disruption - it would be done to us not with us.

Tomorrow: How can we re-imagine 'Housing' for the digital age?