Community-Led Housing

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Typology

Conrad Bower:

"Three of the major forms that come under the broad policy term of community-led housing are: housing co-operatives, community land trusts (CLT) and co-housing. The CLT model developed during the civil rights movement in the US, the first being formed in Albany Georgia, by civil rights leaders making sure that African American farmers had access to land. They spread from there to Canada and the UK. A CLT is a non-profit company that develops and stewards land for the benefit of the community. Goulding says that CLTs are based around trying to separate ownership of the land from the assets on top of it, and are a very versatile platform for serving a community’s needs:

“They have got a pretty wide remit to what you can build on top of it – essentially, it’s got to be done with respect to the benefit of the local community, that is a legal requirement in the Housing Act 2008.”

Housing developments of any type can be used with CLTs, including: co-op, co-housing, social housing, affordable housing and even private housing if that is deemed in the interest of the community by the members of the CLT. Goulding believes CLTs can enable residents living in areas facing gentrification and demolitions of “so called obsolete working class housing” to take back a sense of ownership and oppose these forces, and provides two examples." (https://www.redpepper.org.uk/can-alternative-models-of-ownership-help-solve-the-housing-crisis/)


Examples

UK

Conrad Bower:

"Start Haringey was formed when the St Anne’s Hospital site was put up for sale and initial private housing development plans only proposed 14% of the 470 new houses would be affordable, at a time of severe housing need in Haringey. With the help of the Greater London Authority who bought the land the local community have set up a Community Land Trust to manage the land. They now have plans to build 800 homes on the site, of which 50% will be “genuinely affordable” homes which will be less than the 80% of market rate that the government classes as ‘affordable’.

Granby Four Streets is another CLT in Liverpool that has enabled the community to renovate Victorian terraces and provide them to tenants at a low cost homeownership rate or at affordable rent. They also hold a regular market and are renovating empty shops into a community retail, social and creative hub, and all their projects provide local jobs." (https://www.redpepper.org.uk/can-alternative-models-of-ownership-help-solve-the-housing-crisis/)

More information