PROPOSALS for a ‘community-owned’ neighbourhood of 44 new homes plus 12 local commercial units on the giant York Central development behind the railway station will be aired in public on Saturday.
YoCo – the York Central Co-Owned collective – are holding a drop-in and workshop at St Barnabas Church in Jubilee Terrace from 9am-12 noon on Saturday to talk about their plans.
They are hoping to create a ’walkable’, mixed-use neighbourhood of homes and commercial units, with almost no parking, at the heart of the giant York Central scheme.
York architect Phil Bixby, who helped lead the public engagement process for York Central six years ago and who is one of the driving forces behind YoCo, said the aim was to get away from the ‘generic chunks’ of housing so often built by big developers.
Instead, YoCo wants to create a neighbourhood designed by local people for local people – one which is owned collectively by those who live and work there and where local facilities are within walking distance.
Tentative plans drawn up by YoCo involve two blocks of four or five storeys each. The ground floor of each block would be mainly commercial, with workshops and units for shops and/ or small local businesses.
Above these would be homes – flats or maisonettes – all accessed by street-level front doors.
The idea would be for the neighbourhood to be ‘co-owned’, with subsidised rents and/ or shared ownership, and shared public spaces.
Mr Bixby said the group was in talks with the city council about the possibility of using a strip of council-owned land on York Central near to Leeman Road for the neighbourhood.
Failing that, YoCo would seek a site elsewhere on the huge, 110-acre York Central site, he said.
Mr Bixby said the hope was that funding for the scheme would come from a mixture of neighbourhood membership, potential Homes England grants – and the new Mayor of York and North Yorkshire’s brownfield housing fund.
But he said it was important the neighbourhood was designed and created to meet the needs of the people who would be living there – not of developers.
Saturday’s meeting at St Barnabas Church will be partly to showcase what might be possible, he said, but also to hear from local people about how they might like to see the YoCo neighbourhood develop.
Mr Bixby said that overall he was encouraged by progress on York Central.
It is important that it is not dominated by cars, he said – so he’s pleased that there is almost no parking associated with the plans for a ‘Government hub’ at the site which are expected to be approved by planners next week.
He said he hoped the YoCo proposals would offer an alternative model for developing liveable, walkable, people-centred neighbourhoods that could be applied more generally across York Central.
The masterplan for the York Central site envisages something like 2,500 homes - some of them affordable – as well as a million square feet of office and retail space and a new park.
“York Central is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Mr Bixby said.
“We want to demonstrate that communities can shape their own environment, and that it can work in York.”
The land at York Central is mainly owned by Network Rail, Homes England and the NRM, though City of York Council also owns some of the site.
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