Squatting - you may be surpised what you think

The Netherlands used to look a picture of harmony and tolerance but its liberal outlook is wearing a bit thin. The new coalition government is banning the Burqa, one of it’s party leaders is in court for promoting religious hatred. Even the tree in Amsterdam that sheltered Anne Frank has gone rotten and fallen over.  But perhaps most significantly of all the government has outlawed squatting.

Nothing wrong with that you might think. Surely it should be illegal to squat other people’s houses anyway.  Well perhaps, but it is legal in England and Wales and Dutch tolerance of squatting has actually been a very successful policy. The Netherlands has Europe’s lowest level of vacancy (0.3% compared to 3.5% in UK).

The simple idea in the Netherlands was that if an owner left a building empty for more than a year he lost the right to evict squatters. If the owner was intending to redevelop a building, demolish it, or sell it the last thing he needed was to have it full of squatters who had rights to stay. The effect was of course property owners did whatever they could to stop their property becoming empty, and if that failed, they did whatever they could to get their property back into use within a year.

A whole industry grew up to help. It provided a “guardian” service finding people who would live in empty properties to prevent them becoming squatted. Not only did the law minimise the number of empty properties, a by-product was to create a new sector of housing that was cheap and accessible. Figures suggest that nearly 1% of the Dutch population are now property guardians. The industry has spread beyond the Dutch borders and property guardian companies like Camelot and Ad-Hoc successfully operate in Belgium, Germany, France and the UK.

It is a truth that few dare speak here. But the risk of an empty property being squatted is a powerful motivator for the owner to get it into use. Whether you like the idea of squatting or not, it is probably true that it stops a lot of buildings being left empty. A system like the Dutch are now getting rid of, without doubt, creates an even stronger incentive still.  There are mutterings on the backbenches of Westminster here that squatting should be banned across the UK too. Plenty of people will tell you about the harm squatting causes, much of which will be true. But before you agree to enthusiastically, ask the other question too. What good does it do? You may be surprised what you conclude.

Five things the government should do about empty homes

Zac Goldsmith was kind enough to name check the Empty Homes Agency on the Today programme this morning. He suggested that instead of “garden grabbing” which the government announced it would be restricting , “there are a lot of empty homes lets find ways of incentivising getting them back into use”

All very encouraging. Zac Goldsmith is of course not a member of the government (yet) but this is just the latest in a number of suggestions by people in and around the government that they will introduce measures to deal with empty homes soon. I met Grant Shapps last week and he said nothing to dispel the belief. But what should they do? Here’s what I think


1. Change grant rules to give housing associations a real incentive to buy and refurbish empty homes, and give greater flexibility so that homelessness charities and other community groups can refurbish empty homes too.


2. Government and public sector landlords should hand over surplus properties to local communities for them to bring back into use. Councils should be encouraged to do the same.


3. Give homeowners incentive to refurbish their own empty homes by reducing VAT rates on refurbishment to 5%. It is particularly important that special provision is made for refurbishment if the overall VAT rate rises.

4. Councils should be encouraged to act by extending the government’s proposed council tax incentive scheme (which rewards councils for getting homes built) to long-term empty homes returned to use.

5. Keep council powers including Empty Dwelling management orders. Without them council’s effectiveness is reduced. We agree that they should be amended but please don’t repeal them.

House for a pound

The story of houses being sold for a pound in Newcastle on Tyne has become almost legendry. I couldn’t count the number of people who have asked me whether you can still buy one. You can’t! Or the number of TV producers who think it would make a great subject for a TV programme. It would! So I’m almost ashamed to say that it wasn’t until last week that I actually went to see them. The picture is Mr Naeem the proud owner of one of the houses. Mr Naeem in fact bought two Tyneside flats for 50p each six years ago and knocked them into one house, as did his five nearest neighbours. The result is remarkable. In 2004 Mr Naeem’s road in North Benwell was struggling. There had been riots, there was a worryingly high vacancy rate, and many other indicators that people had lost confidence in the area.

Selling the ten flats was an inspired idea. Mr Naeem and his neighbours signed up to stay in the area for five years and help get the property into good condition. The ethos of these new residents was the reverse of what was happening to the area. They had a stake and a hope that the area was going to get better. The remarkable result appears to be that when enough people think like this it becomes self-fulfilling. North Benwell today is not an area without problems, but it is a normal functioning residential area in one of the UK’s finest cities. There are no riots, crime has dropped dramatically, and the vacancy rate is no worse than any normal city suburb. Of course many other things have been done to help, not least a city warden service that looks out for people and sorts small problems out quickly. But there are plenty of other similar places where these services don’t work. Selling houses for a pound was a brave move by the property owner – local housing association Home housing But the results have paid off handsomely. What they have bought for their investment is hope and confidence the two most valuable assets in regeneration.

A truely edifying spending cut

Being a property anorak I couldn’t stop myself dragging my family around the Peckham House this weekend. It’s not empty, in fact it was full to bursting with visitors for the London open house weekend. Some of you may remember this remarkable house as one of the stars of the Grand Designs tv series. The extraordinary owners managed to create a house in the most unpromising site imaginable, with planning restrictions that would have lead most to think that there was no chance of being allowed to build anything. But not only did they gain permission, they built a house that is pure joy, for the price of a very ordinary flat.

It is that imaginative thinking and that tenacious determination that we need more of if more homes are going to be created out of empty properties. It is easy to see why it is difficult to return empty homes to use, and easy to see how it would be expensive to try, but with imagination and tenacity almost anything is possible. Today I have ben talking to two great examples of both. Urban Infill’s idea is to fill not just the voids in buildings, but the voids around and above them too. You might think of this as filling the missing teeth in the smile of a streetscape

For sheer tenacity look no further than Phoenix housing cooperative. I’ve written about them before, but their latest project in Bow East London shows how tenacity and hard work can overcome huge financial shortfalls. The four flats that they have asked me to open this Friday had been abandoned buy their owner because they were uneconomic to reuse. But for a sixth of the cost Phoenix have brought them back into use
More imagination and tenacity was called for by the Audit Commission last week. It concluded that councils had become too focussed on building new homes at the expense of reusing old ones. It said that by tackling just 5% of empty homes councils could save a staggering £500billion from their homelessness costs. A rather more edifying public spending cut than some have been suggesting over the last few days

Street Level Regeneration

The first week of September still has that back-to-school feel, even though it’s more than twenty years since I had any personal experience. It has at least been back to business this week with meetings with the housing minister and both shadow housing ministers. The word that seems to be on the tip of all of their tongues is localism, although strangely none actually dare utter it.

Type Localism into Google news and it will helpfully flash up a timeline chart showing the occurrence of the word over the last 130 years. Remarkably it was common parlance in the 1880s in New Zealand, but fell away for more than a centaury to suddenly spring back into use in the middle of this decade.

Localism, at its simplest, means political control at the lowest local level. This week Grant Shapps articulated how this concept would work for housing under a Conservative government. Those who had thought localism meant giving power back to councils were in for a shock. He meant more local than that. Indeed the phrase he used was “street level regeneration”

No doubt there will be different ideas of what that means. But this week I have visited a remarkable example in East London. Phoenix housing cooperative have taken on four flats that had effectively been abandoned by their housing association owner. Deemed too expensive to renovate they had been left empty for years. Using a team of local volunteers made up of unemployed and homeless young people supervised and trained by an experienced site manager, Phoenix have managed to get the flats back up to standard at a fifth of the price estimated by the housing association. In a couple of weeks they will become homes again to local people otherwise priced out of the housing market. It’s one remarkable little example, but this is street level regeneration, and if this is localism in action I’m all in favour.

Can I have an Empty Home? Yes You Can!

One of the commonest questions we are asked at the Empty Homes Agency goes something like this “I need a home, but I can’t afford one, can I have an empty one?”

For reasons that are pretty obvious it’s a question we are getting asked more and more often. Our answer I’m pleased to report is the Obama like “Yes you can” In fact even better than that we can sometimes even offer a choice. Our answer goes something like this:

“First of all you can borrow one. The best way to do this is through a shortlife housing cooperative. The cooperative usually takes out a lease on an empty property, puts it into shape and rents it out to its members at low rents. There are lots of cooperatives in London and the south of England such as Westminster Housing Cooperative that operates across London. But shortlife is more sparsely distributed around the midlands and the North of England.

Secondly you can rent an unused property. A similar approach to shortlife has lead to the amazing growth of property guardian schemes. An idea imported for the Netherlands, companies such as Ad Hoc and Camelot have developed it into a flourishing business. Available for employed single people and couples in town and country across the UK and Ireland

Thirdly for a more involved approach there are a number of brilliant self-help housing charities that train homeless people up with building skills and enable them to do up empty properties and create their own homes. The properties are generally surplus social housing. Charities such as Latch and Community Campus 87 lead a growing sector largely based in cities in the North of England.”

Many people are happy with our answer, but many I suspect would like something else. Apparently, even now 90% of us want to be owner-occupiers, and there’s no reason to think that people in housing need don’t have similar aspirations to the rest of the population.

And why not? You should also be able to buy a property cheaply and do it up yourself. In previous recessions “homesteading” has been available to people who would otherwise would be unable to afford homeownership. Councils and Housing Associations disposed of their properties at heavily discounted prices. Newcastle City Council even sold flats for 50p each in the 1990s.

Homesteading schemes helped people with renovating the property sometimes with the help of a grant, sometimes with training. Conditions were normally applied to ensure that only people who intend to become part of the community bought the properties. Speculators were heavily discouraged. This meant that areas with high levels of vacancy and high turnover of residents were stabilised with new long-term occupants who had a strong investment in the community.
Just the ticket for regenerating communities and giving people what they want. It has worked brilliantly in previous recessions, there is no reason why it won’t work in this one. Indeed it could work on privately owned properties acquired especially for the purpose. If you are a council or a property owner who is interested please let me know and let’s make that answer to “can I have an empty home?” even better.

It's not squatting, it's much more interesting

I was chairing the CIEH’s excellent empty homes conference yesterday, when at lunchtime I turned on my mobile to be confronted with “you have 16 new messages” all of them it turned out from journalists. ITV had tracked me down and were waiting outside. What on earth had provoked this?

The answer it turns out is this. Squatters in Bishops Avenue.
For those of you not obsessed with the self-absorbed world of London real estate, Bishops Avenue in Hampstead is said to be Britain’s most exclusive address. Houses have changed hands here for £80million. So news that squatters were here got the property correspondent’s pulses racing.

The story it turns out is much more interesting than that. Calim Ciufudean and his colleagues are not squatters at all. They are licensees or as he puts it caretakers. The crucial difference is they are here with the owner’s consent. Their company Prep ltd offers to look after properties that have been abandoned. The concept proved a bit difficult for some newspapers to understand but the Sun got it, so did London Tonight on ITV. Although some of their viewers came out with the old lines “why don’t they get a job and rent” Apart from the fact that Calim and his colleagues do have jobs, the prejudices just don’t work here. Calim is a resourceful man who is sorting out his own housing and preventing a property falling into wrack and ruin.

There really is something new here. As the local estate agent in Hampstead said: "There's squatting on Bishops Avenue in every recession but it's becoming more organised and gentlemanly. It was more anarchic in the 70s when squatters used to take possession. It's now more organised than squatting, it's more like house sitting”

Self-help-housing

I've had the privilege of visiting number of self help housing projects over the last few years. And I have to say it’s been one of the best bits of this fantastic job I have. There is something that feels very right about enabling people with no home to create one out of one that somebody else abandoned.

Projects like Canopy and Latch in Leeds, advocates for the homeless in London and youthbuild in Harrogate all train young homeless people to renovate empty buildings. Many volunteers end up living in the properties they have renovated and others find work as a result of the skills they have developed. It’s inspiring stuff! There is a growing movement of new schemes starting up all the time. But now for the first time, there is an excellent resource that shows you how to go about it: Self-help-housing.org Whether you want to start a project, want to improve an existing one or are just interested I’d recommend checking it out.