Levent Kerimol

by Levent Kerimol.

We’ve been doing quite a bit of reflecting recently, as it is around 5 years since CLH London really got going. We have always sought to see community led housing become a consistent part of a diverse London housing offer.

Community led housing is all about the empowerment of residents. This contrasts with a more paternalistic relationship between housing providers and residents seen in public housing and private rented housing, as well as in the development of all housing, with generic and impersonal decisions beyond the control of residents and prospective residents. Where residents control what matters to them most about their housing, they have an inherent interest in the qualities of their homes, common spaces, and neighbourhoods. The physical environment and collective decision making can engender more sociable and neighbourly relationships, and lead to a wide range of benefits.

The scale, breadth, and pace of what we have tried to achieve has been ambitious, and has required intensive work, building sector capacity from very little. We have supported a large and diverse range of projects, with a focus on the ‘group’ and ‘site’ stage. Many projects have made considerable progress with support and mentoring from our team.

There are now several projects with credible sites making progress through planning, and it’s great to see earlier projects reaching the end of construction. We have also successfully supported several London boroughs to develop their approach and policies, and providing a number of site opportunities for community led housing. We have proven to be an agile and effective resource.

Despite these valuable successes, we estimate community led housing (CLH) is still around 0.1% of total stock and annual output in London. We’ve seen first-hand, the many intertwined commercial and systemic barriers CLH faces. We’ve sought to find ways around barriers where we can, and attempted to crack vicious circles at different points on each project, one by one. But this is hard work, and we couldn’t help thinking there must be a better way!

Through this thinking we’ve become aware of two related preconceptions; that CLH always starts with a group, and that CLH is about delivering new housing.

The ‘group’ preconception

The diversity of London has naturally generated groups with different motivations and aspirations. From demographic to geographic communities, niche and broad – from independent churches to moorings to established housing co-ops – all with different approaches to tenure, development, partnerships, site identification and acquisition, some seeking to innovate from first principles. While we value the diversity of projects we’ve been involved in, each of these has required largely bespoke support, often starting from scratch.

As humans, we seem predisposed to the story of spontaneously formed community groups, valiantly triumphing over adversity, but success is when community led housing is no longer newsworthy because it is so commonplace. We have also inadvertently defaulted into responding to individual requests from individual groups, trying to fashion projects that meet their specific requirements, whilst faced with similar commercial and systemic challenges every time.

What if we started with clear repeatable project types and enabled interested people to form groups around those projects?

The ‘development’ preconception

Based on our experience with groups, and the enquiries we receive, we see that many people like the idea of living in community led housing but are put off by the idea of taking on a lengthy and risky development project.

Yet somehow we as a sector have readily accepted the mantra from governments of all hues that we need to be building more homes. Community led housing has been presented as a “new source of housing supply”. Government funding has only been for “additional supply”. However expecting each start-up community led group to take on a development project, or be involved in one, is a big ask, and one which invites a range of challenges. Even the partnerships we’ve helped to create have one-off and tenuous due to systemic issues in the London market.

What if we left the practicalities of delivering new homes to those with the skills and resources to do so, and let community led housing focus on what it is good at and where it adds value?

 

We believe what is central to, and distinctive about, community-led housing is resident control and belonging – that people can shape what matters most to them in their housing within a supportive community.

What matters most to most people is not the detail of the development process, but the lived experience, which is as much to do with neighbours, management, maintenance, and security of tenure, as well as the physical form. We’ve seen community expressed even where housing is fairly generic and not purpose-built for CLH.

There is naturally a large desire for affordability, but it is often harder to make housing affordable through small start-up organisations undertaking development. Whereas CLH is very good at locking in any affordability in perpetuity.

Letting go of preconceptions, we are currently working on developing focused pro-active interventions, that give people control and belonging, without the challenges encountered to date:

• Collective Ownership involves purchasing existing properties for collective living, at near market affordability, but offering greater security, control and responsibility, with mechanisms to ensure others benefit in future.
• Building Communities where we help developers incorporate the social and design principles of CLH into ‘live’ developments, and forge communities around these projects.
• Coproduction and Stewardship where power sharing relationships for resident management or community stewardship on larger-scale schemes, add social value and save money in the long term.

We have started to develop these ideas, alongside our traditional work supporting groups and councils creating opportunities. We hope we can broaden what people think of when they think of community led housing, as a realistic and achievable option for all.

 

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Our director, Levent Kerimol, takes a look at ‘A House for Artists’ from a community led housing perspective.

‘A House for Artists’ has had a lot of coverage, especially now that it is nominated for the RIBA Stirling Prize and many other awards. My relationship with the project goes back to a brief meeting with Create, then an East London arts organisation, to discuss the concept, shortly before I left the GLA. I’ve watched the project from afar since. It is hard enough to build anything, let alone a scheme that unlocks possibilities for what our housing might be. I’ve heard ‘A House for Artists’ discussed as though it may be community led housing, so I was keen to visit for myself. I was lucky enough to be shown around by Nicholas Lobo Brennan from Apparata architects, albeit briefly, a few weeks ago.

Firstly, to get some things out of the way, the fact that artists are supposed to contribute in-kind work in exchange for reduced rent seems the least convincing part of the concept. There is no doubt artists on lower incomes need affordable housing, but so do many others doing similarly valuable work. Affordable intermediate rented housing should be available to any household on an eligible income, wherever they work.

Secondly, community led housing should not be misunderstood as housing for particular demographic communities. There may be a logic in linking ground floor workspace with artists, and certain people may value having neighbours that share similar life experiences, but neighbourly mutual support can emerge in all sorts of mixed communities. So let’s not dwell on the artists, and consider the possibilities this project presents for anyone with an intention to live in a neighbourly way – something the vast majority of us are interested in.

The literature suggests an element of “cohousing” in the scheme because three adjacent flats have double doors in the partition walls that can be opened to connect the living spaces into a single large space. This creates something like the cluster flats we’ve seen in German and Swiss Housing Co-ops. Closed doors are acoustically separated, meaning these work as conventional flats, unless there is a mutual agreement and strong desire to live in this way. Artists may be predisposed to alternative forms of living, but I didn’t get a sense this would really be put into use, except for the one night a joint party with lots of guests takes place.

That said, there was lots of scope for neighbourly interaction in the wide balcony walkways and large three-quarter height windows opening on hot days. Cohousing isn’t so much about sharing spaces within individual flats but forming connections across shared outdoor spaces. Nicholas told me residents often sit outside and eat together on these shared walkways. This is made possible with a very deliberate and carefully considered fire strategy, which Nicholas went into some detail about. The plan also allows residents to add internal walls and reconfigure their homes themselves.

The most interesting thing here is that the design goes to great lengths to make these community aspirations compatible with conventional housing. There are a few moments of subtle generosity, as much to do with what is not built, as what is. These tweaks make a radical difference, without an additional construction price tag.

The project was developed by LB Barking & Dagenham’s Be First company, for whom this transferability to conventional housing would have been important, so as not to be left with a white elephant if the particular uses fall away. Community led housing doesn’t have to be initiated or delivered by the community, but bringing some residents into the process earlier is important to kick-starting a community culture and a sense of belonging.

The selection of residents appears to have unintentionally thrown up such opportunities. Whilst there was the usual churn with some having to drop out during the process, prospective residents were able to meet each other and begin to forge a community before moving in, which rarely happens in conventional developments.

The ‘artist’ criteria in the allocation policy will be of note to several community led housing groups. However, I didn’t get a sense that residents have a say over whether they’re likely to get on with any new neighbours, regardless of whether they happen to be artists or not. This is frequently an ambition of cohousing communities.

More significantly, the ownership of the block itself sits with Reside, another LB Barking & Dagenham company set up to provide intermediate and market rented housing. Residents have little influence over their landlord, which they would in community led housing. True cohousing would have seen ownership, or even management and maintenance, transferred to a co-operative of resident-members, for example.

The thought of maintaining your housing block is not a task many will relish. It seems much easier to leave it to others. Yet we all care if repairs are not done quickly and effectively, or if cleaning is poor or costs too much. These are some of the things that matter most to people in their homes, and having the ability to influence them is important. Even if residents are not directly delivering these services, simply being in a position to change things is empowering.

My emerging hypothesis is that the responsibility and obligation to participate in what appear to be banal management decisions, are actually what binds a community together in the long term. It means neighbours have to meet regularly and work together to reach agreement. This leads to the sociable, neighbourly, mutually supportive communities we all want to see, almost as a by-product.

The question is how extensive do these management responsibilities have to be? If we go back to the activities on the ground floor, the fact that residents are responsible for programming the use of the space, and have to decide on this together, may give them a similar common responsibility over an aspect of the building.

A common activity naturally brings people together. Coupled with having things in common as artists, being part of a unique project, and a design that lends itself to community interaction, may well be enough to make ‘A House for Artists’ feel a lot like community led housing or cohousing. It will be interesting to see how long this sense of belonging persists into the future and whether a community culture is reinforced and reformed as future generations of residents come through the scheme, without real ownership or control by residents.

I didn’t get to speak to residents and the experience of home  is very personal will differ from my reflections. However, looking at this project gives us some of the elements that might be needed to infuse community led approaches into conventional housing development, even if some elements were unintentional or missed altogether.
This promises to be an exciting area for community led housing in the future.

 

 

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