Plan B Housing Cooperative Ltd

We're in!

2010-10-04T05:32:00.000-07:00

Just a quick update to say that we are in the house, things are going well and slowly getting off the ground. We'll update properly soon, first we have a very big house to sort out! Thanks for your support,

Plan B

Good news!

2010-07-28T06:08:00.000-07:00

Plan B have exchanged contracts today! We're planning to complete on the 27th August.

We have been in touch with the current owners for some months now and have negotiated the deal over numerous bottles of wine and cups of tea - It's been very nice not having to deal with middle man estate agents! They currently have mutual tenancy ownership of the house and have been living in it communally for some thirty years now. Having decided to sell up this year, they got in touch with us through a friend and asked us to come and look at the house knowing we would fall in love with it straight away. We did and now we're here!

It is a large Victorian semi detached house with a (massive!) garden backing on to Birchfields Park. It's been lovingly cared for as a communal house for the past thirty years so is perfect for a new co-op to move straight into... there is already a huge shelf full of hippy tea. So we hope we can look after it for another thirty years and that it provides us with as good a space for communal living as it has for its present occupiers.

There is a basement space that is currently used as an office and has a separate entrance from the front garden. We hope to offer this space to groups and projects who struggle to find space to use in Manchester - we know from bitter experience that affordable safe space in Manchester is a rarity. We welcome thoughts about how we make best use of the space.

Love Plan B

Call out for loan stock

2009-11-21T11:13:00.001-08:00

We are currently viewing large properties in Manchester with seven bedrooms and space for community use (such as a library or meeting space). To achieve this we have a loan from Radical Routes and we also aim to collect at least 10% of the property value in loan stock. We are already halfway towards reaching our loan stock target and the more that we collect the better. The rest of the property value will be covered by a mortgage with one of the more ethical banks (Triodos).

Loan conditions:

We are taking loans of anything over £500. You can choose the fixed interest rate between 0-4% and you can also choose the time period, such as 5, 10 or 15 years. If interested, please get in touch for a chat. We can show you our business plan (developed with Radical Routes) and are happy to answer any questions you may have.

It is worth noting that in the 21 years that Radical Routes has been supporting starter housing cooperatives they have never had a failed cooperative. This is down to the steady support that member cooperatives give and receive. If a cooperative is struggling at any point, they are given more support by the network. Also, our business plan is based on rental income which is easy to guarantee because housing cooperatives, especially urban, are desirable places to live and tend to have long waiting lists.

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with any questions, using the email address on the right.

An introduction to Plan B: written as part of the radical routes membership process.

2009-07-17T08:37:00.000-07:00

Our Plan B rose from the ashes of the failed Plan B which emerged during the 2007 G8 protests in Germany. Although the attempt to shift the anti-G8 protests away from the fields of Rostock and towards the streets of Berlin never materialised, many of us, inspired by Berlin's radical community, left with the intention of starting the slow process of (re)radicalising Manchester, by, among other things, starting a housing co-op.

Two years down the line, Manchester's very own Plan B is beginning to take shape.

The membership of Plan B has expanded to include other members of a very close friendship group. Between the six of us we are involved in community gardening projects, social centre projects, ethical housing, environmental community work, action medics, climate camp, detainee support, radical reading and publishing projects and activist training and capacity building programmes. We are also all involved heavily with the No-Border network and together helped revive Manchester No Borders back in 2007. Through No Borders politics and actions we have found strong political cohesion allowing our friendships and the project to develop rapidly.

We want Plan B to be a concrete example of how people can co-operate to produce a common future. As well as being an example of how things could be, we also hope that by controlling our own living space we can help to encourage other projects working towards radical change. We hope to have meeting spaces for anti-capitalist groups, a radical library and storage space to facilitate wider organising. With this project we intend to create and leave behind (maybe, one day) a space with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist ethos which will inspire future co-op members. As well as supporting the wider radical community in Manchester we hope Plan B will be a supportive space for all it's members. “Burn out” is a serious problem that affects many within our community and co-operative living can help to share the burdens of living in an often frustrating and alienating world.

Away from the spectacular nature of the Plan B against the G8, we hope our very own Plan B will show how we can collectively challenge exploitative power relations in our everyday lives.