My main project for the second week of my LiA in York was helping get Yorspace's new website set up and ready. Many revisions and small edits later, it's now published! 

However, I also got to work on the annual impact report, which gave me an opportunity to dive into everything Yorspace has done over the past year and the impact it has had on the local community.  I learned about how Yorspace's model of affordable housing is different from most social housing providers in the UK. Typically, social housing here is subject to the "Right to Buy", a policy from the 1980s that means that social housing can be bought by its residents at any time for a discounted rate, which leads much of it to end up in the hands of private market landlords. Part of Yorspace's mission is creating financial structures for affordable housing that avoid this requirement, allowing the homes to be affordable in perpetuity, but that comes with tensions because it means the organization is less able to access funding from the national government.

This is quite different from the social housing landscape in Canada, and so seeing how the history and politics of a new place shape its cities and its housing supply was a really great opportunity for me. 

The most exciting event from this week was attending UKREiif 2026 (the UK Real Estate, Infrastructure and Investment Forum) in Leeds. With more than 16,000 attendees, it was certainly the largest conference I'd ever been to.  Attending UKReiif meant seeing how the national government's target of delivering 1.5 million homes looks on the ground and getting to hear candidly from investors, local governments, and builders about what makes and breaks projects and what it is like to be working towards that target. 

A few highlights included meeting the York & North Yorkshire Mayor David Skaith, panels about community-led housing and how to activate the UK's vacant homes, and realizing that someone speaking on a panel was the same person I had listened to on a podcast about affordable housing months ago! It was also great to meet the team from Resonance, one of Yorspace's key social investors.

I also enjoyed the massive scale model the East Midlands Local Authority made of their district, showing former power generating stations and opportunities for revitalization and investments. 

More substantively, the conference made me reflect on the currently small role the community-led sector plays within the larger world of housing development, and it was inspiring to hear how passionate the representatives of other non-profit developers were about changing that, mainstreaming community-led housing, and sharing experiences with each other to become a stronger, more unified sector. The fact that the community-led presence at gatherings like UKREiif is growing is to me a promising sign for the future!