Our social housing behemoths ignore the empty properties which a bit of self-help can bring back into use

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HouseBy David Floyd

We don’t have enough social housing. All the major political parties currently agree. According to 2008 government statistics, one in twelve people in the UK were on social housing waiting lists. At the same time, the Empty Homes Agency estimated that there were 943,000 homes across the UK lying empty. This is ridiculous at a time when economic hardship crosses over with massive housing need.

Empty properties say that a neighbourhood is failing. They attract anti-social behaviour and are more likely to end up completely unusable the longer they are empty.

Luckily, there’s an alternative to hand-wringing and recriminations. The practice of community groups taking loan of properties that would otherwise be disused or empty for a fixed period and returning them to use isn’t new, nor that complicated. It’s called self-help housing.

Self-help housing is the process of transforming empty properties into places where people can live and manage those properties for the benefit of the community. It’s about local people solving local problems. Successful organisations like Middlesbrough’s Community Campus, Latch and Canopy in Leeds, and Giroscope in Hull do self-help housing in different ways but they’re all doing brilliant work getting houses into use and helping young people in need of training and accommodation.

Over the last two decades community development and regeneration has often fallen into the hands of professionals preoccupied with management and measurement. Self-help housing has been off the radar of the all major political parties because, despite protestations about enabling local communities to help themselves, the reality has been the opposite.

Existing self-help housing projects struggle to make ends meet. That they get little or no help from large and well-resourced housing associations is a scandal.

All parties have favoured housing associations gobbling up other housing associations to create bureaucratic behemoths fit to fund and co-ordinate massive developments. These organisations are just too big to act quickly and address specific local needs. They have forgotten their roots.

The point of our new initiative is to remind powerful people that self-help housing exists and let people know that they can do it themselves.

As Self-Help-Housing.org’s project director, Jon Fitzmaurice says: “When I tell people that it’s possible to ask property owners to loan them empty houses, most look at me with a mixture of shock and excitement. They ask ‘doesn’t that drive down property prices?’ and ‘why don’t the owners put the houses up for rent?’ All ask: ‘how do you do it?'”

Our website includes guides to getting started, finding property, making agreements, organising volunteers and getting funding. It has the first ever directory of active self-help housing projects. It has sample policies, contracts and agreements.

Self-help housing is about active citizenship. It’s a positive alternative to the culture of ‘someone should do something about that’. To make a real impact in our communities, all it takes is a group of people and a property owner to use their imaginations and take those first steps.

David Floyd is Managing Director of Social Spider CIC. Self-help-housing.org is a partnership between Social Spider CIC, Agents-for-Change and hact.

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