The Aussies seem to make a land rent scheme work in Canberra, Australia, which was founded on Garden City principles. The Land Rent Scheme is part of the ACT Government’s Affordable Housing Action Plan. The scheme gives people the option of renting land through a land rent lease rather than purchasing the land to build a … More Land Rent Scheme in Australia
We reconnected with Naked House and found we both had two major challenges: the government was trying to ban ‘ground rents’ on the basis that some have been misused. Some larger developers had sold leasehold houses with clauses enabling ground rents to double every 10 years so making the homes expensive and unsaleable. Community Land … More Can housing be affordable?
Having secured a meeting with the Bishop it seemed important to get support from Enfield Council to give more weight to any proposal using the combined church and council land. While looking for supportive policy we stumbled across a document “Custom & Self Build in Enfield” which put forward a strategy for delivering custom and self … More Trying to get Enfield Council support
“My Lord, … we are looking for support within the Church for our small community led housing proposal… The development would pioneer a new form of affordable housing made possible because the Church would retain ownership of the land. Families would be able to own their own homes but not have to buy the land … More Writing to the Bishop
It was clear that we had got as far as we could with the property departments. We needed to reach visionaries. We began to draw up a prospectus: ‘Reimagining Community: a pilot scheme in N14’. This was inspired by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ‘Reimagining Britain’ in which he challenged ‘the purpose of housing should be … More Calling on higher support
My husband Peter spent Christmas working up a scheme for the two sites to house 5-7 units, to make the most of the site. He was also formulating a proposal to convince the church that, rather than sell off the ‘family silver’ to fund philanthropic ‘mission’, community housing was, in fact, a mission purpose in … More Community Housing is mission
‘Hope for Housing’. The Community Land Trust Conference was just that – a ray of hope in an otherwise hopeless housing market. To understand why this ray of hope is so important one has to realise just how hopeless the ordinary person feels, the feeling of despair at not being in control of one’s destiny, … More Hope for Housing: CLT conference
Naked House encouraged us to seek out Peter George, Head of the Regeneration team at Enfield. He was a pioneering and visionary leader, although very busy. Perhaps we could make contact and look to do something on a smaller scale as a self build community initiative? The benefit of having a similar narrative, Stephen said, … More Community-led homes is best value
Stephen likened our approach to a not-for profit Community Interest Company called Naked House. They were part of the Urban Community Land Trust family and, like us, were responding to the need of families who don’t qualify for social housing but are unable to afford a home on the open market. In 2015 they won a … More Naked House
We began to pick up where we had left off with our ideas of community building. If the Church and Council were looking at marrying the two sites for a larger housing development, then being both public mission landowners surely they should at least consider a community scheme for local families committed to the local … More Building community – could this be key?
Diary of a Wannabe Self Builder 