A forbidding clock tower rises above the arched windows of a former Victorian workhouse in east London’s Mile End, behind a hoarding which trumpets the conversion of the crusty old pile into an enclave of luxury apartments. The mortuary, morbidly located next to a graveyard at the end of this brutal conveyor-belt complex, has been reborn as The Lodge, a two-bed flat for £999,995 – the kind of inflated price that is increasingly familiar, even here in one of London’s poorest boroughs.
But buried among the workhouse chic and the new brick apartment blocks is an unlikely experiment in building homes that will remain affordable to local people forever. After a decade of campaigning, the East London Community Land Trusthas succeeded in creating housing where the prices will be linked to local income in perpetuity, entirely detached from the superheated speculation of the property market.
“It’s incredibly exciting to finally see it for real,” says Taj Uddin, a 40-year-old local government worker, walking into the living room of his new two-bed flat for the first time, where full-height windows lead to a balcony looking out over a communal lawn. Born down the road, Uddin has watched as the neighbourhood’s property prices have spiralled beyond his reach, forcing him to live with his brother. Jessie Brennan, a 34-year-old artist, was in a similarly precarious situation, having rented in the area for years before being priced out to the Thamesmead estate, an hour’s bus and train ride further east, where she has been living as a property guardian.
“As soon as I heard about the community land trust, it was a no-brainer,” she says. A CLT puts the housing in community ownership, with homes sold or rented at a rate linked to local wages and membership open to anyone with a connection to the area. It’s a radical model that effectively takes housing out of the property market and pegs it to the labour market instead. “It’s crazy how in this country we treat housing as an asset for accumulating wealth,” Brennan adds. “I don’t see why you should be able to make a profit from your home.”
She and her partner, together with 23 other households, will move in this month, paying less than half the market rate for their properties. One-bed flats offered by the CLT are around £130,000, while identical private flats in the rest of the development start at £450,000. The catch? When they come to move on, they will have to sell at a price that remains pegged to local earnings, forgoing the potential windfalls of London’s property lottery.
As the capital’s first community land trust, the St Clement’s project was made possible because the site, home to a mental health hospital that closed in 2005, was owned by the Greater London Authority. After a long grassroots campaign, led by charity Citizens UK, the GLA asked the successful developer, Linden Homes, to work with the East London CLT group, which had also bid for the site.
The 23 CLT flats represent a small proportion of the overall development of 252 homes, comprising just under a third of the 35% affordable quota, with the rest rented out by the Peabody housing association. It’s a fraction of what the campaign had originally hoped for, but they have laid the groundwork for a form of truly affordable housing that is gathering momentum across the country.
In 2010, there were 36 community land trusts in England and Wales; now there are 225 groups, with 700 homes built to date and a further 3,000 in the pipeline to be completed by 2020. With CLTs taking off in low-income inner-city areas, they can no longer simply be dismissed as the niche preserve of Grand Designs enthusiasts.
“It has become a real resistance movement now,” says Catherine Harrington, director of the National Community Land Trust Network.
“People are demanding more of a say about what regeneration looks like, instead of sitting back and being told what the future of their area is going to be,” she adds. “It’s about changing the narrative of housing: building homes rather than investment units; having security and stability in a particular place, rather than being forced to move every six months; and mobilising popular support for development.”
In December the government announced a new £300m Community Housing Fund, of £60m a year over five years, to support CLTs, which Harrington says could triple the number of homes delivered.
To continue reading more: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/16/radical-model-housing-crisis-property-prices-income-community-land-trusts
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