Planning can be maddening.  Try proposing a new pub in a residential area and you will face a torrent of opposition because of the potential disturbance.  Try removing a pub from a residential area and this time face the same abuse for losing a much loved facility.

The same sort of perversity can apply to co-living schemes.  Authorities may be crying out for additional residential development but it still won't stop some of them opposing a co-living scheme simply because it doesn't fit within the straight jacket of the policies which they adopted long before co-living was even a concept.  As this article points out, some co-living developers actively avoid developing on residential sites because the authority does not regard co-living as being residential.  Of course that is absurd, but the authority may be driven to that conclusion if they think they cannot extract any affordable housing or if the CIL schedule has been so tightly drafted that the use cannot require the payment of CIL.

What is called for is surely a degree of pragmatism - allowing co-living units to 'count' as housing in any bean counting exercise; allowing the authority to claim a reasonable amount of affordable housing as part of the approval package and ensuring CIL schedules are not so tightly drawn up so as to preclude payment on schemes that are essentially residential in character.

With this approach developers will have the confidence to promote housing schemes that meet modern ways of living and authorities will get much needed residential accommodation.