Help, please.
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LibDems took control at South Lakeland District Council in May, and our top priority was "Affordable Housing". We have identified through a housing needs survey that almost 3500 new affordable homes across the district over the next five years. We are holding a conference in Kendal in October with key stakeholders to attempt to find solutions to our problem. We would welcome views from this blog which we might use to inform our activities. Particularly we have two major issues: the Regional Spacial Strategy has allocated (IIRC) 100 new homes a year; and we have the Lake District National Park Authority as the Planning Authority for part of our district.
Help, please. We are attemmpting to give action not just words.........but we feel we have both of our hands tied behind our backs in this particular struggle.
I've been working with a couple of LibDems (Jock Coats and Bill Powell, plus Antonia Swinson in Scotland) to develop new affordable housing solutions/policies using a "Community Land Partnership" approach (an updated version of Community Land Trusts).
see
http://www.opencapital.net/co-ownership.htm
http://www.opencapital.net/papers/BeyondPredictandprovide.ppt
Using this mechanism it is possible to come up with a simple but radical new solution which keeps the land in community ownership, but allows "Co-owner" occupiers to acquire "Equity Shares" in the properties on the land.
Funding does not come from Banks/Building Societies but from Pension investors for whom the long term rental revenue streams are extremely attractive.
Happy to contribute to the proposed workshop in Kendal.
Best Regards
Chris Cook
Cllr.Rob Broadley
The solution or part of it would be to link certain affordable homes to a raft of specific employments. These would need to be tight in terms of eligibility so as to avoid abuse.
I think this already happens in certain parts of the country and could be expanded.House swop could apply if your job takes you to a different area.
This would have the additional advantage of making public service jobs more attractive without the high inflation causing pay rises.
It would be another perk like pension entitlement.
I'm sorry I hadn't picked up this discussion earlier. If it's not too late Id like to join in. Chris Cook has already mentioned the work he and I and Bill Powell are doing. I am chair of Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts which is a new organisation dedicated to developing mutually owned community led housing and other affordable property assets without public subsidy and geared specifically to local community needs.
Community Land Trusts are also party housing policy (I was on the Federal Housing Policy Working Party a couple of years ago and we heard from the chief executive of the organisation who is now our development partner here at Oxfordshire CLT, CDS Co-operatives, who had originally commissioned research from New Economics Foundation and others about the mutual ownership idea).While in planning terms you may find it difficult to dedicate new housing to local needs, if developing through a CLT you can absolutely condition these, as the CLT is effectively run - from specification and design to development and ultimately reuse - by local communities. I know of a group in the Peak District where, faced with similar problems of gentrification by incomers from the big northern cities have I believe used the model to insist on local connections for any new housing built in the National Park.
I don't know Lakeland as well as North Yorkshire (I nearly became an Ampleforth monk and my former best friend is, sadly, buried in Goathland churchyard) and I was recently having a conversation with a young planning officer based at Northallerton (that's your district isn't it?) who I knew from his time as a student here at Brookes.
It seems to me that CLTs would help. And I've been promising myself to write to Lib Dem council groups to see if they want someone to come along and talk to them about the model and how it might work.
The solution to the housing problem isn't just about the ownership of housing, and frankly we're missing the point if we think it is.
It's about how we live as much as who owns the places we live in.
A major pressure on housing supply in the South East is a phenomenon known as household formation. We're choosing to live in smaller and smaller households - which means, on our own. Most of these new households consist of older people.
This doesn't just have repercussions on the housing market. It has social and environmental repercussions, too. Single-person households use more resources, per capita, than multi-person households. The informal support networks within households have to be replaced by formal, and expensive, networks of paid carers, which are also much less sensitive at picking up problems.
Yet demographic pressures mean that these changes are to some extent inevitable. With an ageing population, it will never be possible to replace single-person households with supportive extended families.
The opportunity for public policy intervention to change how we choose to live is limited. Nevertheless, alternative forms of housing, including in particular shared living households, need to be encouraged.
Shared living households are highly successful, if statistically-invisible in London. Many younger key workers live in shared flats and houses. These households are not only the primary private sector source of affordable housing in the capital, they are also an important contributor to the capital's social life, providing newcomers to the capital with a way into a social network that is not connected with their place of work. Recent legislation to class them all as HMOs is deeply to be regretted; but the main problem surrounding their statistical invisibility is that there is seldom the right "box to tick" in
forms designed to gather information.
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