Housing as social infrastructure

Building community and integrated support

As the pervasive narrative around housing remains fixated on ‘build, build, build’, I spend much of my time advocating for a more holistic, ambitious goal: viewing housing as social, not just physical, infrastructure. By this, I mean intentionally creating homes and communities that actively support people to feel connected, develop a deep sense of belonging, and stay well. Relational health, through facilitating social connection and a sense of belonging, is a core pillar of prevention, providing the critical social safety net that reduces risk, need and reliance on acute public services.

While the sector is often dominated by profit-driven housebuilding, there are exciting bright spots demonstrating this potential. While these are welcome it is critical to maintain a clear focus on both ethical scale and keeping the relational core intact.

Grosvenor Hart Homes’ integrated support model

One such bright spot is  Grosvenor Hart Homes. The social enterprise, initiated by the Duke of Westminster, aims to improve outcomes for young people and their families. They are working to address some of society’s most complex challenges in an integrated way: providing high-quality, affordable, and secure homes, in a supportive community with access to wraparound support.

Grosvenor Hart Homes recently acquired 40 new homes in Ellesmere Port, adding to the 29 that were recently refurbished in Chester. Residents are identified through referrals from children’s services, referrals from housing services, and applications for market tenancies, with expectations that all tenants will have skills and resources to offer one another as part of a community. A team of dedicated practitioners offer practical hands-on support, and coordinate the complex landscape of local public services including healthcare, children’s services, and education for the families that need help the most.
At its core, this approach is about prevention: providing a return on investment across a range of public service areas through reduced reliance on high-cost children’s social care placements, fewer school exclusions, improved school attendance and decreased use of acute healthcare. 

It represents a long-term savings approach, often extending beyond an electoral cycle, requiring politicians to act more long term. As Grosvenor Hart Homes look to create long term impact, and scale up their work through more projects, the key themes for any successful model to explore are: 

1. The ethical and systemic challenges in the social housing sector
    
2. The central role social infrastructure, not just physical infrastructure, must play to give these homes the best chance of success. 

1: Navigating ethics and scale

At Innovation Unit, our goal is to tackle inequalities and transform the systems that surround them by growing and scaling bold innovations. Projects like Grosvenor Hart Homes offer a real opportunity to move beyond housing purely as shelter, toward self-sustaining, scalable models generating enough income to cover operational costs, invest in future growth, and meet social objectives without relying solely on precarious public funding. Crucially, these projects measure success by the number of people they help achieve better outcomes, not by profit or the number of housing units completed. However, as they look to scale through more projects, it is critical to consider the ethical and systemic challenges in the social housing sector.

Since the Grenfell Tower tragedy and the death of Awaab Ishak, the social housing sector has been encouraged to 'get back to basics' by providing safe homes and listening carefully to tenants, a shift enforced by regulatory reforms. For example, the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 strengthened the powers of the Regulator of Social Housing, compelling landlords to take serious safety hazards and tenant complaints with the urgency and accountability they should always have received. What is so promising about Grosvenor Hart Homes is that they go far beyond the basics of increasing supply and meeting basic standards for healthy, warm and safe homes. 

2: Beyond the white picket fence: lessons for scalable social infrastructure

The Grosvenor Hart Homes model, with its emphasis on integrated support and long-term residency, is one of many live examples of utilising housing as critical social infrastructure and a preventative public service. 

Grosvenor Hart Homes’ plan to scale to over 750 homes over the next decades is connected with embedding social design into its fabric. My research into 54 shared living and intergenerational communal homes in Australia and the US (see Beyond the White Picket Fence: A companion for intergenerational communal living), shows that the enduring success of intentional, supportive communities hinges on three core design areas:

Communities like Bridge Meadows (intergenerational housing for people impacted by the care system and older, low-income adults) and Los Angeles HiFi Collective (housing people with experience of homelessness and mental and physical health conditions) are brilliant examples of models that have successfully embedded these three design areas to create enduring supportive communities. You can read about these and many others in Beyond the White Picket Fence.

Opportunity alongside responsibility 

Grosvenor Hart Homes is investing in the right foundational strategy by integrating home, health and employment, and prioritising a strong relationship between their professionals and the families they serve. Seeing this new social enterprise deliver its first refurbished homes and a dedicated community facility is an encouraging bright spot.

There is plenty of evidence that prevention-focused, community models of neighbourhood health and care  save money long term and, more importantly, transform lives. The critical challenge is to ensure that they spread and  scale in ways that do not  strip away their relational core - it is these relationships and this community support that transforms lives.