It's Not Difficult

I think I’d rather be told straight “You’re wrong!” But ours is not the kind of issue that promotes outright opposition. The strongest resistance we normally get goes something like this “Of course I agree that bringing empty homes into use is a good idea, but in practice it’s just too difficult.”

It’s an annoying put down because it would be petulant to get cross in response. But that doesn’t mean I agree.

These words most commonly come from the lips of local authority councillors or people running housing associations. What it generally means is that they know they have to create more homes, but the way they know how to do it is to do a deal with a developer who is building a large new housing development. The skills and knowledge you need to pull off deals like this are not to be sniffed at. Many housing associations are very good at it. And it works – or at least it did.

What it also implies is the skills they used to have to negotiate the purchase of individual houses and the skills to renovate them are no longer needed.

But now housing associations have a problem. Last year just 118,000 homes were built in this country – half the government’s target. That’s half the number of potential deals they need; and unless millions of pounds of taxpayers money is poured in, half the number of new social homes.

Now lets look at a different type of housing supplier; a private landlord. Between them private landlords provide about the same amount of housing as councils and housing associations. Very few try to do deals with developers and hardly any build new homes. Where most acquire property is through buying existing second-hand homes. Visit a property auction house and you will see most that homes are bought by private landlords, what’s more most of those they buy have vacant possession and need to be improved before they can be let. Private landlords it seems still have the skills to buy and renovate empty property.

Now, of course, private landlords operate on a different scale to councils or housing associations. A recent ARLA survey showed the average private landlord owned seven properties. The National Housing Federation’s latest figures show that the average housing association has more than 2,000 properties. But if bringing an empty home into use isn’t too difficult for a landlord who owns a handful of property, there’s no rational reason why it should be too difficult for a landlord who owns thousands. The housing market has changed, and if social housing is going to keep pace it needs to borrow the skills of private landlords. Bringing empty homes really is a good idea, and it’s a highly viable way of creating new housing. It’s only too difficult if you don’t know how to do it.

PROD this!

Three years ago, after a visit to the road I described this as the most dispiriting case the Empty Homes Agency had ever dealt with. Four large and imposing Victorian villas overlooking one of Liverpool’s great parks had been left to rot and deteriorate to the point that they were virtually falling down. What made it so dispiriting, was the owner of the property was the very organisation we expect to look to resolve problems like this: The local council. The houses were purchased by compulsory purchase by the council at the beginning of the decade to improve them. But nothing of the sort happened. Residents were moved out and the decline set in. First fly tippers used the gardens as rubbish dumps, looters broke in and stole the architectural features, vandals set about damaging what was left, and then last year somebody set fire to them. Local residents decided not to stand for it, and after numerous unsuccessful requests to the council to deal with the houses, the Friends of Newsham Park used a little used legal power to request action. A PROD (public request ordering disposal) was served on the secretary of state (at the time Ruth Kelly) requesting that the properties were sold. Ruth Kelly agreed, but gave the council a final year-long chance to sort it out. As is the way with housing ministers, by the time the year was up she was no longer the minister. Another round of campaigning by residents finally got Hazel Blears to make a decision, it turned out to be another final chance for the council of another year. By the time this year had expired she had gone too. Another year of hand wringing by civil servants followed after which further campaigning forced a decision from the present minister John Denham. He acknowledged all the problems caused, apologised and then announced that the case was closed.

Politicians of all colours talk of the importance of communities being empowered. Indeed the ministers I mention call themselves Secretary of State for Communities, and the civil servants I mention are in something called the Community empowerment directorate. But when, as in this case, a community took them up on their offer, the response was embarrassment and obscuration. Councils have (in my view correctly) been granted powers to compulsorily purchase land and buildings to improve conditions for the community. But where that fails communities have the right to demand redress. This community was let down first by its council and then by its government. I said it was dispiriting! But ironically there’s something uplifting here too. Despite all the obstacles the community didn’t give up and indeed still hasn’t. I’m a true believer that persistence pays. The desire to get something done is almost always greater than the desire to stop it. In the end if they are right they will prevail. I believe they are and they will.

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.

Help Yourself to Free Empty Property?

Every week or so we get a call from somebody who has spotted an empty property and wants to know how they can claim it for themselves. The BBC TV series “Britain’s Empty Homes” that started this week has prompted viewers to ask us this question on an almost daily basis. The people who ask believe that because a property is unused, it is freely available to anybody who wants it. All you have to do, they think, is get there first, lay claim and hey presto it belongs to you. These callers area usually disappointed when we explain that it doesn’t quite work like that. What everybody else may be surprised to hear is it’s not entirely untrue either.

The legal concept here is a bit of common law called Adverse Possession. It goes back to the days of Henry V111. In essence it says that if somebody squats a property or piece of land for 12 years without being challenged they can apply to become the registered owner. If the original owner can’t disprove the claim they loose title.

In practice it only works like this for property or land that is not registered with Land Registry. The Land Registration Act of 2002 introduced new rules for registered land that better protects the rights of the owner. The squatter can apply to become the registered owner after they have occupied the property for 10 years. Land Registry then contacts the land owner gives them notice of what as happened. They have 65 business days to object. If they don’t the squatter becomes the registered owner, If they do the application fails and the owner is free to evict the squatter. However if after another two years the squatter is still there, they can apply again and they’ll almost certainly successfully become the new registered owner, even if the original owner objects.
More details from the Land Registry here

Christmas, Lego and Building Your Own House

My eight-year-old son announced yesterday that he preferred Lego to God. The dilemma that brought about this announcement was the time clash of the local church carol concert and James May’s TV special on building a real house from Lego. Set against this competition God never stood a chance.
In case you didn’t see it, the programme got thousands of volunteers to build a full size house out of Lego bricks allowing James May to live in it for a day and night. It was a TV triumph and if I’m honest more entertaining than the carol concert (which you may have gathered, I missed as well).

Building a house without complicated building skills or the expense of architects, builders, and without digging big holes or messy mortar sounds a great idea. In fact it’s an idea that predates this TV programme by many years. Architect Walter Segal came up with a similar concept in the 1960s. His system of timber frames and wooden panelling was easy and cheap to put together and allowed anybody to become a hosuebuilder.

Ok the houses look a bit quirky but I’m convinced that there’s something very special in this idea. For most of human history people have built their own homes, and in much of the world people still do today. It’s just us, a few western nations like ours, that have subcontracted this role out to house building companies.
Now that it is obvious that the builders can’t keep up with our demands. And frankly their most recent efforts have shown that they are not building what most of us want. Hasn’t the time come to think about building homes again ourselves. Lego may not prove to be the building material of choice, but if it inspires people to think about whether they really could build a house, then perhaps God may forgive us for missing his carol concert this year.

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.

Empty homes petition

My thanks to Charles Bazlinton for starting the empty homes petition on the No. 10 E-petition site. I’d urge and encourage you to sign up.

Swapped: a Paperclip for a House

A year ago Kyle McDonald embarked on one of those bizarre quests that only the internet can make possible. He started with one paper clip and claimed that within a year he was going to trade it up for a house. Exactly one year and 14 trades later he has done it. His first trade was a swap for a pen, by September he had traded up to an old van, and by earlier this summer he had traded up (or down depending on your view) to an afternoon with Alice Cooper. Tomorrow he completes the transaction that sees him acquire a house (a swap for a role in a movie) in the town of Kipling in the central Canadian state of Saskatchewan.

Who on earth would swap a house for a role in a movie? Well it turns out that Kipling is suffering from a problem we in the UK know about very well. Housing oversupply. There are more houses in Kipling than households who want to live in them resulting in lots of empty homes. What the town council has done is effectively give a way a house in order to attract new residents into the town. It’s a technique that some council’s and housing associations have used here too. We call it homesteading and it can work very well. Declining areas of Sheffield, Newcastle and Blackburn have been turned round. I wrote about it in the Observer last year you can read the article here. What the town of Kipling is going to do with the role in the movie is not recorded.