CALIFORNIA DREAMING

Tim Dwelly, director of Live Work Network, reports from his recent visit to see live/work in action in California

For those of you still coming across planners who doubt that live/work property really will catch on in the UK, there are a number of points you can make.

First you can point to the ongoing rise in the numbers of home based businesses as well as the wider rise in home working. Home working doubled to around one in ten of the workforce between the last two census years of 1991 and 2001. All the surveys since have show that trend continue or even accelerate.

Now we know that the DTI's own surveys show that 41% of all UK businesses are home based. More and more of these will need premises that are designed to incorporate professional workspace. The signs are that many do not want to abandon the advantages of home working (saves times, saves money, saves on carbon footprint) when their business expands beyond the spare room. Where are they to go?

Then you can point to global warming and all that this implies for how we use property in the UK. One premises not two means no commuting. It also means only one building site in the first place, less use of natural resources and one set of fuel bills not two. Live/work makes environmental sense. And on employment land where the alternative is often one or a few larger employers who (if they close) can leave little in their wake, live/work is also a way to sustain higher value employment in the area.

Finally you can refer them to this website. Since we set up Live Work Network we have found the number of schemes being worked up and applications granted to have risen and risen. There are now live/work schemes under way all across the UK. This certainly wasn't the case at the beginning of the decade (see www.liveworkhomes.co.uk for some examples).

But what if the planners still shake their heads? What if they suggest live/work is only going to be a passing phase? 'Where are all the sites that work?' Well, we can certainly help here - pointing to just such developments.

But we can't say that this is a mature market yet in the UK. To see what such a market looks like, you can refer the planners to the USA.

I visited California in 2006 to find out more about the US live/work market.

The first big impression I got straight away was its scale. All across the USA live/work is going big. Try creating a google news alert on live/work units and see for yourself.

There are many similarities to the UK. A tendency to link the concept to loft living (especially in urban centres), a connection with creative industries and the perennial concern to make sure live/work units continue to be used as workplaces.

But what is different is the context. In the USA, land values are relatively lower than here for residential property, and closer to commercial values. There is simply more space to build.

The driver behind wanting a live/work unit for the US live/work buyer is therefore less likely top be high property prices or lack of space in the chosen place to live. It is much more about the lifestyle choice and the popularity of improved work-life balance and what the Americans call 'zero commute'.

City councils across the USA - and especially in California where live/work is particularly prominent - often have detailed building codes that specify not only how a live/work unit may be used, but which floor can be used for what.

Many codes include the equivalent of what we call use classes in the UK, including one often known as 'flex'. Flex codes can be applied to, for example, a  ground floor of a live/work units allowing a range of uses on that floor from commercial to residential.

'Some codes restrict flex use to an ongoing mixed use,' explained masterplanner and architect David Sargent. 'In other words, there is a requirement to use the space for work as well as living.'

This sounded even more controlling than many of our UK planning conditions applied to live/work. But in practice, although there is bound to be some difference between what the planners say should happen in a building and what does, live/work does seem to have settled into the public mind in many cities and towns as a perfectly normal property type.

That has not happened in the UK yet. My point is that, with extra drivers making live/work necessary in the UK (a crowded island with very high relative housing costs and perhaps more concern over global warming), the US market may well be a pointer for how the market develops in the UK.

Chris Velasco is president of Place, a specialist non-profit developer of artist live/work clusters. His schemes, while formerly working with live/work developers Artspace, have been developed as far afield as Minneapolis, Texas, Pittsburgh and Iowa. View more on Artspace.

Velasco's background is in helping cities - especially those seeking to reinvent themselves for the modern economy - to create visible change buildings. Often landmark or disused buildings converted into live/work blocks aimed at the creative sector. 'The live/work schemes we build help to redefine the nature of the neighbourhood,' he says. 'It's an environmentally friendly way to land a creative cluster into an urban area, attracting not only those whose work is creative but potentially opening new markets for those who want to buy their services or products.'

Place are currently working with the city of Ventura, around an hour north of Los Angeles, to develop a new live/work quarter.

'We are using this scheme to breathe life into a relatively run down part of the city and to reinforce the new creative identity being nurtured on Main Street,' says Elena Brokaw, director of community services at the city council.

The scheme is known as WAV (Working Artists Ventura). Pronounced 'wave' to reflect the coastal city's surfing heritage. 'We are using live/work as a way to firm up the reputation of downtown Ventura as a cultural district,' says city manager Rick Cole. Already the area, which has echoes of the 1950s about with thrift shops and retro cafes, is becoming more modern, with new galleries and gourmet restaurants breathing life into the town centre (peripheral shopping malls dominate the outskirts of the city). The WAV project looks set to anchor this.

WAV will offer affordable living and working space for over a hundred artists of every kind - painters, sculptors, dancers, poets, musicians, filmmakers and more. 'The artists will bring to life a theatre/gallery with performances, art openings and neighbourhood gatherings,' says Chris Velasco. 'Arts-friendly small businesses including coffee houses, galleries, cafes, wine bars and jazz clubs will draw foot traffic and contribute to the vitality of the community. With the community involved in every phase of development, the WAV project is being created for diverse, mixed-income families and individuals.'

Supportive housing services will be provided to those at the lowest end of the income scale while market-rate condominiums with ocean views serve higher-income households.

'WAV represents the vanguard of innovative sustainable cultural facilities,' says Velasco. 'The entire community will be designed and built to the highest standards of green building technology, including recycled building materials, water and energy conservation, and renewable power from the sun.'

Although well known as a surfing hotspot, Ventura still retains a certain old fashioned charm, which is hoped will be retained while new ingredients are added to its appeal.

Further up the coast and facing no major challenges of this kind is the highly desirable city of Santa Barbara. Here some live/work schemes were built over a decade ago.

Some are 'living above the office' type units (see example below)

Others were more overtly aimed at creative businesses. When I visited one of these, I found lots of evidence of continuing work use, despite the desirability of the location and no planning controls on how the properties are used.

Bill Horton is a font designer. His company Foho has operated from the live/work unit at Santa Barbara since it was built. He shares space with other creatives and typically for a live/worker uses more computers and space than a home worker would do.

'For me it's a lifestyle I have just got used to,' he says. 'It's partly about being able to work when I like even if it's at night. But I like the downtown location and really appreciate not having to commute or even to drive to shops.'

Now close to retiring, He finds that the live/work unit will enable him to continue to earn occasionally as he scales down, another interesting lesson for the UK, where in the future more retired people may need to supplement pensions with earnings.

Meanwhile at the 'upscale' end of the live/work market, specialist developer Zachary Schneiderman of Creative Environments told us that 'for our buyers, the appeal is usually the chance to avoid commuting. It can take people an hour to get across LA to their office and the roads are often gridlocked. Live/workers are people who want to avoid all this because time is precious to them - for business and lifestyle reasons.'

What typifies an American live/work unit? Well like in the UK every scheme is different. There are lofts that are open plan and there are properties with defined workspaces.

A more common phenomenon than has yet matured in the UK market is the family business live/work property. It is quite usual to find properties with the ground floor reserved for workspace (often with shop front type windows) and two or more floors of living space above. In urban areas these will often have no garden of their own but shared open spaces. They will also often have well designed loading bays and well thought through rear areas where vehicle access is allowed, encouraging safe pedestrian areas on the frontage.

What does strike me as a key ingredient in the USA is the live/work quarter. The most successful schemes seem to be all about bringing often creative or at least IT-savvy freelancers and small business people together in a neighbourhood. Live/work properties that are scattered amongst residential property are less likely to succeed.

The lessons in the UK can be probably be summarised as...

1. Once live/work becomes better known developers are more keen to produce it

2. Live/work quarters or clusters are the best way to proceed. They can also help to regenerate or redefine neighbourhoods which need a new economic identity

3. Buyers like the concept of 'zero commute'. The work life balance appeal of live/work property is growing. Live/work as a contribution to the response to global warming also appeals

4. Although the US live/work market may not be replicated in the UK, its scale and its rapid growth show that a major live/work market is very much a practical possibility

5. Specialist live/work developers are more likely to create sustainable live/work schemes than residential housebuilders

I returned to the UK from this visit more convinced than ever that live/work works and is going to grow rapidly in the UK once it becomes more familiar and the live/work development sector matures.