As urban loneliness rises across UK cities, co-living housing is emerging as a practical, community-led response that supports wellbeing while addressing housing pressures. However, planning policy and market assessments must evolve to properly recognise and enable co-living’s social value if it is to scale effectively.

Urban loneliness is no longer a marginal or seasonal issue. Across cities in the UK, social isolation is becoming a year-round reality that cuts across age groups, income levels and housing tenures. Planning debates often focus on housing numbers and narrowly defined housing and tenure mixes; yet, more fundamental questions are increasingly being asked: how are people living, who are they living with and are they well served by traditional housing offers?

It is in this context that co-living is gaining renewed relevance in the UK. What began as a niche response to housing affordability and viability pressures is now being recognised as a meaningful way to address urban loneliness, while also delivering flexible, community-oriented housing.

This blog draws on insights from our latest industry report, Co-living as a Response to Growing Urban Isolation.
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Urban Loneliness and the Limits of Conventional Housing

Loneliness has emerged as a structural issue in modern urban life. Research and cultural commentary increasingly show that isolation is not confined to older people or specific seasons but affects all generations, including younger  people, renters and single-person households all year-round.

At the same time, the UK housing system remains largely designed around individual units rather than lived experience. Planning policy tends to prioritise unit mixes, minimum floor space and external amenity as proxies for quality, often overlooking how housing design can be an opportunity to support wellbeing, connection and community.

This disconnect has created space for alternative housing models to emerge.
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Co-Living Housing: More Than a Typology

Co-living housing offers a different way of thinking about how people live in cities. Typically combining private studios with high-quality shared kitchens, lounges, workspaces and amenity areas, co-living is designed around everyday interaction as well as convenience.

Importantly, evidence from community-led housing research, including work by the London School of Economics, shows a clear relationship between shared living models and reduced loneliness. Residents consistently report stronger social ties, increased mutual support and a greater sense of belonging.

In this way, co-living can be understood as a form of social infrastructure, not simply a housing product.
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Community-Led Housing and Social Wellbeing

The principles behind community-led housing are closely aligned with co-living. Both prioritise shared spaces, social interaction and long-term wellbeing over purely private consumption of space.

Well-designed co-living schemes are increasingly demonstrating how housing and wellbeing are intrinsically linked. By creating environments where people are more likely to interact informally - cooking together, working alongside one another or participating in curated community activities - co-living can help reduce social isolation in towns and cities.

Crucially, this benefit is not limited to younger renters. Intergenerational co-living, where older adults share buildings or communities with younger residents, is showing promise as a response to loneliness, under-occupation and economic insecurity across age groups.
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Planning Policy: Lagging Behind Lived Reality

Despite these benefits, planning policy has been slow to evolve. In December 2025,  the draft National Planning Policy Framework acknowledged co-living – for the first time in planning policy at a national level. While this is welcome, it stopped some way short of offering an explicit endorsement and makes no provision to require authorities to consider demand for co-living during plan-making. There continues to be limited recognition of communal living models and most local plans continue to categorise shared accommodation narrowly, often alongside HMOs or student housing.

This creates a regulatory blind spot. Metrics rarely account for this form of development, and shared amenity space and studio space standards remain focused on private floor area rather than overall quality of life. As a result, developers and local authorities are often forced to navigate outdated frameworks when bringing forward co-living proposals.

With emerging policy updates, including the NPPF and the recent consultation on the London Plan, there is a timely opportunity to better reflect the social value of shared living within strategic planning policy.
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Co-Living in Practice: Lessons from UK Cities

Recent co-living developments in London, Manchester and Bristol demonstrate how the model can work well when thoughtfully designed and well managed. These schemes show that co-living can support:

• Stronger community formation
• Predictable, all-inclusive living costs
• Improved financial resilience and wellbeing
• Greater access to central urban opportunities

In cities like Manchester, where graduate retention and student spillover intensify demand for rental housing, co-living can also help address undersupply and affordability pressures that contribute to isolation among young professionals. Similar dynamics are driving interest to two planned co-living and co-working schemes in Brighton, that TRP has secured planning consent for.
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The Role of Evidence in Supporting Co-Living

At Third Revolution Projects, a core part of our role is translating the realities and benefits of co-living to planners, committee members and local communities. All too often, co-living is misunderstood or dismissed as “student housing in disguise” with transient communities or an exclusively high-end product.

By embedding economic and social impact analysis into the planning process, we help demonstrate how co-living responds directly to local demographics, deprivation patterns and unmet housing need. This evidence-based approach allows appropriate weight to be given to social value considerations in the planning balance, even where policy support is limited.
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Rethinking Housing to Tackle Urban Loneliness

What is increasingly clear is that tackling urban loneliness requires more than simply building more homes. It means rethinking how people live together, how communities form and how planning policy supports social wellbeing.

Co-living in the UK is not a fringe solution. It is a response to long-term demographic, economic and mental health trends and a housing model that reflects how people increasingly want - and need - to live.

Planning now has a critical role to play in normalising community-oriented design, supporting intergenerational living and embedding wellbeing into housing policy. Without this shift, we risk continuing to build ever more efficient homes for increasingly isolated lives.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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1. What is co-living housing?

Co-living housing is a form of professionally managed residential development that provides private living accommodation alongside shared communal spaces, such as kitchens, lounges, workspaces, indoor and outdoor and amenity areas. It is typically designed to support higher-density living while maintaining quality of life through shared facilities and active management.
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2. How does co-living help address urban loneliness?

Co-living can help mitigate urban loneliness by embedding opportunities for social interaction into the design and operation of residential developments. Shared spaces and organised community activity can support social connection and mutual support, contributing to improved wellbeing outcomes when compared with more conventional housing models.
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3. Is co-living only intended for younger residents?

No. While co-living is often associated with younger working-age adults, evidence indicates that residents span a broad age range. Intergenerational co-living models, in particular, are increasingly being explored as a means of addressing loneliness and under-occupation, while supporting more diverse and balanced residential communities.
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4. How does co-living differ from student housing?

Co-living differs from student housing in terms of occupancy, management and planning objectives. Co-living developments generally accommodate working adults, operate year-round and place greater emphasis on long-term residency, community-building and shared amenity provision, rather than short-term or academic-cycle occupation.
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5. What are the wellbeing benefits of co-living housing?

By prioritising shared spaces and community interaction, co-living housing can support housing and wellbeing outcomes, including reduced social isolation and improved mental health. All-inclusive rental models may also contribute to financial stability and resilience, which can be relevant considerations in planning assessments of social value.
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6. How is co-living currently addressed in UK planning policy?

Planning policy for co-living in the UK remains limited and inconsistent. While some strategic policies provide a framework for assessment, many local plans do not explicitly recognise communal living models. This can create challenges in relation to space standards, density metrics and the consideration of social value within the planning balance.

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