Objective Establishing a safe and worthy place to live is an important step for people struggling with substance abuse and psychiatric disorders. In this project, we have followed Trondheim Municipality in the process of establishing a new housing model that contributes to safety and mastery for people with combined disorders and violent behaviour. Background Providing comprehensive services to people with violent behaviour affected by drug use, is chal-lenging. Trondheim Municipality aim to develop a breadth of housing and services for this target group. One of the plans in that context is to establish a home for 6-8 people in close physical con-nection to the mental health-care department at St. Olav's hospital. Methods An action research approach is suitable when the goal is to create change and where the intention is to create new solutions to current problems (Levin, 2017). Qualitative interviews with professionals in the field, user representatives, workshops and participation in the planning process and literature studies, have been conducted. Results The need for safety, fixed routines, positive impulses and the opportunity to influence one's own everyday life is pointed out as crucial for people with a behaviour that either scares or is exploited. Several emphasize the importance of activities and food-serving to secure that nutritional status is maintained. Conclusion Rethinking housing models for the target group is necessary but difficult in practice. There is a need for innovative solutions, design and services for the individuals that secures the employees and the neighbours.

Dutch housing associations focus on communal living with the aim of stimulating social interaction between (older) residents and strengthening cohesion. Although the added value of communal living for social interaction between residents has been discussed in the literature, there is still little known about the broad range of variants of communal living for seniors in the social rented sector. Therefore, it seems relevant to explore how socio-spatial factors of communal living that may stimulate social interaction are reflected in different variants of communal living in the Netherlands. Based on relevant influencing factors from the scientific literature, we performed an explorative cluster analysis in order to distinguish between variants of communal living with quantitative data from national housing association Woonzorg Nederland. As a result, four variants of social com-munal housing for seniors were identified. Some variants distinguish themselves mainly on the basis of spatial factors, while other variants mainly differ with regard to social and organizational factors. Strikingly, only two of these variants resemble the more intensive forms of communal living as described in the literature. There seems to be a discrepancy between communal living as described in the scientific literature and communal living as it occurs in Dutch social housing. The question of how the different variants of communal living relate to social interaction has yet to be answered.