Our director, Levent Kerimol, spoke about housing design standards, and community led housing, where communities are looking to meet a range of housing needs and aspirations, both in terms of their physical arrangements and in terms of affordability.
There were a range of sessions at the symposium organised by the Royal College of Art and Architecture Foundation at the Barbican.
Join us on Tuesday 19 March 7-9pm at Three Sixty Work Rooms, Barking, IG11 8NW to help shape opportunities for community led housing in the borough.
Be First and Barking & Dagenham Council have identified four parcels of land that they would like to deliver as community led housing, starting in 2024.
We are inviting community led groups and organisations from across the borough to help shape the kinds of homes that could be delivered.
We’d love to meet you, hear about your experiences of housing and talk about if and how community led housing could help address particular needs in your area. We hope to see you there!
Please contact us to find out more:
Rowan@communityledhousing.london
The first residents have been moving into their new homes in Ladywell, after RUSS achieved ‘practical completion’ of the main construction works earlier in February.
This is a fantastic achievement for one of the most ambitious community led housing projects of recent years.
The scheme pushes innovation in environmental sustainability, a full range of affordable tenures, various typologies, and most importantly community collaboration and resident empowerment in their own homes.
We have been working with CDS Co-operatives who will be delivering housing management services for RUSS, and acting as the Registered Provider landlord of social rented and intermediate shared flats in the new scheme.
Our director, Levent Kerimol, was involved from very early on, helping Lewisham Council think through their approach to community led housing and self-build, getting approvals, and running the council’s procurement process for an affordable, community-led, self-build scheme on the Church Grove site.
There is still work to do before all residents move in. The community will be finishing the gardens and the interiors of their own flats. However this feels an important point to mark, from one phase to another as the resident community bed in and we start to see the tangible community as these homes mature.
NW3 Community Land Trust are overjoyed to have secured planning permission for their plans, forged alongside the local community, which will deliver 14 new highly sustainable homes, 8 of which will be genuinely affordable, including 2 homes for social rent and 6 for discounted sale.
Community Led Housing London has been working alongside NW3 CLT since very early on, helping with financially credible proposals, land transfer terms, and the intricacies of the planning process, as well as engaging with Registered Providers about taking on landlord responsibilities of rented units.
Co-founder and chair of NW3 CLT, Sanya Polescuk, said:
“I’m still somewhat in a disbelief that we did it but somehow we have planning permission! Thank you to everyone for your work, support, belief and perseverance…. This represents the hard work that local people and supporters have put in to deliver new affordable housing in the community we so cherish.”
Cllr Danny Beales, Cabinet Member for New Homes, Jobs and Community Investment previously said:
“As a Council we are proud to be supporting new and innovative methods for delivering desperately needed affordable homes and what NW3 CLT’s proposals will do is empower local residents to step into the role of developer and to lead directly on the delivery of more affordable and sustainable homes for their local community.”
The homes have been designed by Mole Architects who specialise in sustainable and community-minded design. The design navigates several site challenges including the steeply sloping site which is surrounded by mature trees. Situated in a conservation area, the design makes reference to the local vernacular of mansion blocks and decorative brick fronted buildings. The building contracts and expands in plan to create space for a shared resident’s garden and to provide south facing aspects to all apartments. The work on planning has been project managed by Altair and funded by the Greater London Authority on a repayable basis.
The Community Land Trust was incorporated in 2016 and has over 175 members from the local community who democratically control the organisation. Belsize Park and Hampstead are some of the most unaffordable neighbourhoods in London, and the CLT aims to provide environmentally sustainable and affordable housing, which remains in perpetuity. CLT developments are often for local people priced out of the housing market and can add to the range of affordable housing options in an area, broadening the spectrum beyond the statutory social and intermediate housing offer.
Affordable flats, social rental and discounted sale will be cross-subsidised by flats for market sale. Although the intention is for all tenures to participate in a neighbourly community, to make the most of health and wellbeing benefits, for instance through reduced loneliness.
The existing building was demolished in early 2022, having been irrevocably damaged by a fire in 2017 in which one resident tragically died. This site was significant for the local community, and leant itself to a community-led approach.
The hoardings at the front of the site currently contain a display of artwork by local young artist Megan Menzies entitled ‘Daleham Dreaming’. It depicts two sleeping figures wrapped up in patchwork dream blankets, with each patch containing a dream inspired from the community around Daleham Gardens. The project started with a dream post-box in which passers-by, residents, and children were encouraged to post their dreams for themselves, for the local community, and for the world.
by Levent Kerimol.
We’ve been doing quite a bit of reflecting recently, as it is around 5 years since CLH London 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 0.1% of 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 been tenuous one-offs 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:
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.