The Slow Redefinition of Value
Residents Real Estate isn’t a policy or an academic term; it’s a way of describing something everyone in York already understands instinctively. It’s the value created by people who live in a place long enough to contribute to it — the lineage of parents and children, neighbours, volunteers, the people who remember how a street used to feel and the people shaping how it might feel next.
It’s not sentimental. It’s structural. It’s the difference between a house and a home, between a venue and a node of community memory, between a development and a neighbourhood. Residents recreate value simply by living here. You don’t need a glossy strategy document to explain it; you can see it in any street with the right mix of people, history and activity.
The issue now is that York’s housing market no longer treats Residents Real Estate as something with inherent worth. It’s treated as something that can be priced out, repackaged or even exploited for profit — the hard work has been done, a buzz has been generated and this gift is taken and sold for a higher price to new habitants. And once that happens, a city begins slowly losing its continuity one avoidable decision at a time.
Who owns York?
When Good Organisation began digging into housing patterns, ownership records and short-stay conversions, the picture that emerged was clearer than anyone expected. York’s housing wasn’t simply stretching under demand — parts of it were being repurposed entirely.
Homes becoming assets. Assets becoming short-term lets. Neighbourhoods shifting from lived-in to weekend-ready. Ownership detaching from occupancy.
The data wasn’t a theory. It was visible in Land Registry entries and offshore locations, in clusters of properties held by small portfolios, in the speed at which long-term rentals were evaporating in favour of higher-yield models.
And that’s where my framing of Residents Real Estate comes in. Because when ownership becomes detached from residence, the city changes its centre of gravity. Decisions get shaped by people who don’t rely on York day-to-day. Streets fill with people who arrive with keycodes on phones rather than keys in pockets.
Long-term residents watch their options narrow even as the market appears “busy” or “healthy” on paper. It’s not about blame. It’s about recognising a system that makes less and less sense for the people who actually live here.
Short-Term Logic — Long-Term Loss
Short-term ‘let’ thinking has become a quiet organising principle across York. Not just in housing, and not just in tourism — but in how decisions get framed. Short-term logic says:
“Optimise for yield — the community will adapt.”
“Weekend vibrancy equals long-term health.”
Except it doesn’t.
The first Outside Influence zine I helped on laid this bare. Monthly rents that outrun wages. Families cycling through temporary accommodation. Young people realising their first step on the ladder is located outside the city they grew up in. The data didn’t require much interpretation — it spoke for itself.
York’s younger residents are already feeling the consequences. They spend their formative years building networks, friendships and cultural lives here — then discover they may need to leave to find a place they can afford. The people who should become York’s next generation of contributors are instead being dispersed. This is how a city can lose its future.
Minecraftian Blocks
There’s a certain type of building that has become increasingly common across York. Box-forward, compliance-friendly, visually neutral. Architecture shaped more by spreadsheet than street. Not offensive, just absent.
I get the Passiv Haus test, the need for green and they do tick those sustainability boxes. But do they tick the “does this belong here?” box. These are the Minecraftian blocks — functional, efficient, stripped of personality and designed primarily to maximise units within a footprint. They could be in Milton Keynes, Manchester, or the Midlands. They just happen to be in York.
York doesn’t need pastiche, but it does need intent. It needs the modern equivalent of ambition — the Georgian confidence, the Victorian solidity, the medieval eccentricity. Buildings that say: “This matters enough to build well.” Instead, many of the new builds say: “This will do.” And when placed within long-standing spaces, the mismatch becomes impossible to ignore.
Residents Real Estate and the Lineage Problem
Residents Real Estate stretches across generations — the understanding that a city is shaped through time, not turnover. York Minster still stands because generations protected it, funded it, worked on it. Long-term thinking created long-term culture.
Now compare that with buildings designed for fast return or short occupancy. Different worlds. Different priorities. Different timelines.
When a city’s built environment becomes dominated by short-term logic, the cultural and social lineage that sustained it begins to thin. The spaces that once nurtured shared memory get replaced by ones designed to accommodate instagrammable moments. A place loses something when its future isn’t being built by the people who will inherit it.
A 360-Degree Approach
The pothole gripe shouldn’t be dismissed. Its a very real frustration that shows people feel they’re needs are being overlooked and more effort is being redirected to making the central pavements ready for the new visitors next day. Is there a way to listen and show a balanced solution towards all of Yorks asks.
Good Organisation have been gaining trust and slowly building a 360-degree picture of York’s visitor economy and researching what a “Tourism Levy” could be — taking influences from other global tourist hotspots (even venturing to the cold spots of Iceland to hear their stories). What started out as a set of self-initiated workshops — scraping AirBnB datasets, mapping ownership patterns, listening to residents, talking to businesses, comparing lived experience with what showed up in the numbers — has grown into a resident inspired manifesto about what York can do next.
That groundwork now feels timely, because the conversation has finally reached the people who can turn it into policy. With the recent announcement from Lord Mayor David Skaith that York and North Yorkshire will formally explore how a Tourism Levy might work here, the city suddenly has space to look at the idea beyond the knee-jerk objections, the usual “this will put visitors off,” and the assumption that it’s either a fix-all or a threat.
What Good Organisation, York St John University and York Residents Know have been assembling isn’t a finished model. It’s a map of where the pressures sit — and crucially, where they overlap. Residents dealing with rising housing prices and cost of living. Businesses accommodating seasonality. Cultural venues holding up the city’s identity with increasingly fragile margins. Short-stay operators trying to operate responsibly but caught in a system that rewards volume over balance. Neighbourhoods that carry the impact but rarely get influence.
The value of the work isn’t in prescribing what the levy should be. It’s in showing the city what questions actually need answering. Done well — shaped with the same listening that built the early research — it could finally give York a tool to rebalance the relationship between the visitor economy and the people who live here.
What Happens If a City Prices Out Its Own Future?
A city’s culture doesn’t disappear because visitors arrive. It disappears when residents can’t stay long enough to pass anything on. If York’s next generation can’t afford to remain in the city that shaped them, the cultural life that brought them up won’t survive their departure. You can’t replace continuity with rooms daily turned around ready for the next and expect the result to feel the same.
The question isn’t “what’s the price of housing?” It’s “what’s the price of losing the people who built the city’s identity in the first place?”
Is it too much to ask?
When value is created from a place we must aim to recirculate the gains made. A preliminary manifesto has been created by residents to feed into future York Tourism strategies. It follows a theme seen globally with cities experiencing the same imbalances and stressors where the residents quite rightly ask for:
- housing that remains genuinely accessible
- tourism revenue that supports the people carrying the cultural load
- developments that understand where they are, not just what they yield
- decision-making that prioritises long-term residents over short-term ‘let’ thinking
- the city to remember its strength comes from those who have and still do help make it day-to-day-to-day…
York doesn’t need a revolution. Like many other tourist hotspots It needs help rebalancing. Can the city afford to lose the Residents Real Estate? Do we recognise it’s worth being far more than anything a short-term model can replace — especially when it’s displaced from its hometown?
Homelessness Inequality Lived Experience Local Community Social Commentary Tourism
What’s the Going Price for Residents Real Estate?
The Slow Redefinition of Value
Residents Real Estate isn’t a policy or an academic term; it’s a way of describing something everyone in York already understands instinctively. It’s the value created by people who live in a place long enough to contribute to it — the lineage of parents and children, neighbours, volunteers, the people who remember how a street used to feel and the people shaping how it might feel next.
It’s not sentimental. It’s structural. It’s the difference between a house and a home, between a venue and a node of community memory, between a development and a neighbourhood. Residents recreate value simply by living here. You don’t need a glossy strategy document to explain it; you can see it in any street with the right mix of people, history and activity.
The issue now is that York’s housing market no longer treats Residents Real Estate as something with inherent worth. It’s treated as something that can be priced out, repackaged or even exploited for profit — the hard work has been done, a buzz has been generated and this gift is taken and sold for a higher price to new habitants. And once that happens, a city begins slowly losing its continuity one avoidable decision at a time.
Who owns York?
When Good Organisation began digging into housing patterns, ownership records and short-stay conversions, the picture that emerged was clearer than anyone expected. York’s housing wasn’t simply stretching under demand — parts of it were being repurposed entirely.
Homes becoming assets. Assets becoming short-term lets. Neighbourhoods shifting from lived-in to weekend-ready. Ownership detaching from occupancy.
The data wasn’t a theory. It was visible in Land Registry entries and offshore locations, in clusters of properties held by small portfolios, in the speed at which long-term rentals were evaporating in favour of higher-yield models.
And that’s where my framing of Residents Real Estate comes in. Because when ownership becomes detached from residence, the city changes its centre of gravity. Decisions get shaped by people who don’t rely on York day-to-day. Streets fill with people who arrive with keycodes on phones rather than keys in pockets.
Long-term residents watch their options narrow even as the market appears “busy” or “healthy” on paper. It’s not about blame. It’s about recognising a system that makes less and less sense for the people who actually live here.
Short-Term Logic — Long-Term Loss
Short-term ‘let’ thinking has become a quiet organising principle across York. Not just in housing, and not just in tourism — but in how decisions get framed. Short-term logic says:
“Optimise for yield — the community will adapt.”
“Weekend vibrancy equals long-term health.”
Except it doesn’t.
The first Outside Influence zine I helped on laid this bare. Monthly rents that outrun wages. Families cycling through temporary accommodation. Young people realising their first step on the ladder is located outside the city they grew up in. The data didn’t require much interpretation — it spoke for itself.
York’s younger residents are already feeling the consequences. They spend their formative years building networks, friendships and cultural lives here — then discover they may need to leave to find a place they can afford. The people who should become York’s next generation of contributors are instead being dispersed. This is how a city can lose its future.
Minecraftian Blocks
There’s a certain type of building that has become increasingly common across York. Box-forward, compliance-friendly, visually neutral. Architecture shaped more by spreadsheet than street. Not offensive, just absent.
I get the Passiv Haus test, the need for green and they do tick those sustainability boxes. But do they tick the “does this belong here?” box. These are the Minecraftian blocks — functional, efficient, stripped of personality and designed primarily to maximise units within a footprint. They could be in Milton Keynes, Manchester, or the Midlands. They just happen to be in York.
York doesn’t need pastiche, but it does need intent. It needs the modern equivalent of ambition — the Georgian confidence, the Victorian solidity, the medieval eccentricity. Buildings that say: “This matters enough to build well.” Instead, many of the new builds say: “This will do.” And when placed within long-standing spaces, the mismatch becomes impossible to ignore.
Residents Real Estate and the Lineage Problem
Residents Real Estate stretches across generations — the understanding that a city is shaped through time, not turnover. York Minster still stands because generations protected it, funded it, worked on it. Long-term thinking created long-term culture.
Now compare that with buildings designed for fast return or short occupancy. Different worlds. Different priorities. Different timelines.
When a city’s built environment becomes dominated by short-term logic, the cultural and social lineage that sustained it begins to thin. The spaces that once nurtured shared memory get replaced by ones designed to accommodate instagrammable moments. A place loses something when its future isn’t being built by the people who will inherit it.
A 360-Degree Approach
The pothole gripe shouldn’t be dismissed. Its a very real frustration that shows people feel they’re needs are being overlooked and more effort is being redirected to making the central pavements ready for the new visitors next day. Is there a way to listen and show a balanced solution towards all of Yorks asks.
Good Organisation have been gaining trust and slowly building a 360-degree picture of York’s visitor economy and researching what a “Tourism Levy” could be — taking influences from other global tourist hotspots (even venturing to the cold spots of Iceland to hear their stories). What started out as a set of self-initiated workshops — scraping AirBnB datasets, mapping ownership patterns, listening to residents, talking to businesses, comparing lived experience with what showed up in the numbers — has grown into a resident inspired manifesto about what York can do next.
That groundwork now feels timely, because the conversation has finally reached the people who can turn it into policy. With the recent announcement from Lord Mayor David Skaith that York and North Yorkshire will formally explore how a Tourism Levy might work here, the city suddenly has space to look at the idea beyond the knee-jerk objections, the usual “this will put visitors off,” and the assumption that it’s either a fix-all or a threat.
What Good Organisation, York St John University and York Residents Know have been assembling isn’t a finished model. It’s a map of where the pressures sit — and crucially, where they overlap. Residents dealing with rising housing prices and cost of living. Businesses accommodating seasonality. Cultural venues holding up the city’s identity with increasingly fragile margins. Short-stay operators trying to operate responsibly but caught in a system that rewards volume over balance. Neighbourhoods that carry the impact but rarely get influence.
The value of the work isn’t in prescribing what the levy should be. It’s in showing the city what questions actually need answering. Done well — shaped with the same listening that built the early research — it could finally give York a tool to rebalance the relationship between the visitor economy and the people who live here.
What Happens If a City Prices Out Its Own Future?
A city’s culture doesn’t disappear because visitors arrive. It disappears when residents can’t stay long enough to pass anything on. If York’s next generation can’t afford to remain in the city that shaped them, the cultural life that brought them up won’t survive their departure. You can’t replace continuity with rooms daily turned around ready for the next and expect the result to feel the same.
The question isn’t “what’s the price of housing?” It’s “what’s the price of losing the people who built the city’s identity in the first place?”
Is it too much to ask?
When value is created from a place we must aim to recirculate the gains made. A preliminary manifesto has been created by residents to feed into future York Tourism strategies. It follows a theme seen globally with cities experiencing the same imbalances and stressors where the residents quite rightly ask for:
York doesn’t need a revolution. Like many other tourist hotspots It needs help rebalancing. Can the city afford to lose the Residents Real Estate? Do we recognise it’s worth being far more than anything a short-term model can replace — especially when it’s displaced from its hometown?