Could community land trusts offer a solution to the UK's housing crisis?
06-29-2014
The first trust in London's Mile End is proving that affordable homes for local people can be built in areas of high value
Emma Howard
The Guardian,
St Clements hospital community land trust
The former St Clement’s hospital in Mile End, east London, where London's first community land trust is creating 23 affordably priced flats. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Three months ago, Colin Glen gave Boris Johnson an orange tree. He wanted to thank the mayor for launching a new housing development in east London. The civil engineer used to live in the area but when his family outgrew their one-bedroom flat they left to find somewhere they could afford. "After we had our first child, it became unbearable," he says. "We were living on top of each other, with stuff everywhere. It was a desperate time."
Overcrowding is rife in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, which has the fastest growing population in England and 24,000 people on its housing waiting list. The average home costs more than £620,000, a rise of 43% in the past year – the highest in the UK. Glen says the prices are causing the "fragmentation of ordinary working families". His wife's family have been here for three generations.
But there is hope for local residents at St Clement's, a sprawling, gothic building soon to be home to London's first community land trust (CLT). Grade II listed and set on a conservation area, it was built as a workhouse in 1848, turned into a mental health hospital after the second world war and closed in 2005. Since then it has stood derelict.
A CLT enables land to be bought and kept in community ownership in perpetuity, passed down through the generations. Houses are sold or rented out at a rate that is linked permanently to local incomes. The east London CLT expects prices for its 23 homes on the St Clements' site to range from £140,000 to £285,000 – half the price of the 229 adjacent homes that will be sold at full market value to subsidise the cheaper ones.
Membership of the trust is open to anyone who lives, works or has strong active ties to a social institution in the area. Just £1 buys a share in the not-for-profit company. Membership is not the sole consideration when it comes to allocating a CLT home. An independent panel will decide who gets a home in keeping with the council's housing allocation policy. They will be local people with housing needs but enough income to buy a property.
Construction has now started after a 10-year campaign for an east London CLT. It took a decade to get off the ground because of the difficulty of finding a suitable site. There was then a lengthy procurement process.
It was also hard to get political support for what was then an untried concept in an urban area in the UK. Construction firm Galliford Try bought the site from the Greater London Authority, on the condition that it gifted the whole site to a community foundation for St Clement's and the surrounding area. This means that the foundation, which is in the process of being set up and will include representatives from the CLT, Peabody, (which is buying some homes on site for rent) and the local community, will be the freeholder. The CLT has received funding from the Oak Foundation to pay for staff time and professional support.
Glen, now the east London CLT community director, puts its success down to local people whose ideas are the basis of the project's design. Many became involved through community organisers at the charity Citizens UK. It was the charity's campaign for the CLT that eventually got the backing of former London mayor Ken Livingstone and his successor, Boris Johnson. The roots of the CLT lie in the 2004 bid for the Olympic Games. Local community organisers successfully negotiated for the inclusion of an affordable housing legacy for east London, including a living wage, a skills academy for young people and for the first urban community land trust to be built on the Olympic Park itself. But when London won the bid, the organisers were told that the concept of a CLT must first be proved with a pilot.
I walk around the pilot site at St Clement's with Mark Taylor, whose 17th-floor flat overlooks the former workhouse. A driver for a special needs school and the chair of a local residents association, he was approached by organisers from Citizens UK five years ago. He is now a trustee and treasurer at the CLT. He has lived here for 20 years and worked at St Clement's when it was a psychiatric hospital. He takes me around the overgrown cemetery and the outskirts of its high walls and iron gates. Somewhere within, the orange tree will be planted, once the builders have cleared away the daffodils, the placards and the lichen-covered directions to hospital wards.
Citizens UK has now set its sights on the national challenge. It is launching "a civil society manifesto" for the 2015 general election which is calling for half of all affordable housing provision to be built on community land trust sites – 750,000 homes by 2030.
The manifesto also asks the government to publish an audit of all land in public ownership and for a new definition of affordable housing, which since 2010 allows social housing providers to charge tenants "up to a maximum of 80% of the market rate". The policy, which fails to take account of people's income, has caused such controversy that nine councils recently took the London mayor to the high court to contest it. They lost their case.
Local methodist minister Paul Regan is leading the manifesto's housing proposals. He says that the campaign for St Clement's has taught them that land is the real issue. "If affordability isn't related to people's income it doesn't matter what proportion of the housing stock is for social housing. Unless we change how we treat land, I don't see how we can ever tackle the housing crisis. When so much is being sold out of public ownership, it drives a spiral of decreasing supply and increasing demand. It is a vicious circle in which investors can only see there are profits to be made," he says.
The CLT model has been imported from the United States where it grew out of the civil rights' movement. The largest CLT in the US now has more than 2,000 homes. In England and Wales, more than 170 CLTs have already been established; but all but 25 are in rural areas, from Cornwall to the remote Holy Island of Lindisfarne. The barriers to urban CLTs are much higher because of the difficulty of acquiring land in high value areas, a lack of capacity, and competition from existing providers; homes can be lost to the open market and not retained as affordable housing.
Earlier this month, however, the movement was given the rubber stamp by the planning minister Nick Boles at the launch of the National CLT Network and an injection of £3m of social and charitable investment into the sector. Network director Catherine Harrington says "so many people said CLTs couldn't be done in an urban setting. The success in east London has been so important. There is a real sense now that the movement has arrived."
At St Clement's everyone remains magnanimous about who will get the houses. It will not provide a solution for Glen, or Taylor, or the borough's poorest residents. Yet Glen says that St Clement's has become "a beacon of hope" for local people. Now they are hoping – and asking – for more.
Tower Hamlets mayor, Lutfur Rahman, has committed to creating a landlord registry – to weed out bad landlords – more community land trusts and a model for a "living rent" that would prevent landlords from raising rents above a specific threshold.
Glen, meanwhile, has bought Johnson another present: a lemon tree. He expects him to plant it on the site of the CLT they were promised in the Olympic Park.