1. Viability assessments exposed to public scrutiny



The root of exactly why so many developments get away with being vastly over-scaled and yet not providing anywhere near enough affordable housing comes down to the developers’ dark art of the “financial viability assessment”. Enshrined in national planning policy as the ultimate credo, these reports are used to justify precisely when a project is not worth the developer’s while to build, based on projected costs and revenues, while all the time safeguarding their 20% profit. Statutory demands from the local authority for affordable housing can be easily dismissed as making a project unviable: spreadsheet says no. Yet the figures are routinely fiddled, in documents that are completely hidden from public gaze. Local councils are mostly powerless to challenge these assessments, relying on appraisals produced by the very consultants that work in the interests of the property industry. Opening up this shady world of cooked books would shine a spotlight on the planning process and ensure democratic accountability.

2. More council housing built by councils

The problem with relying on the private sector to provide so-called affordable housing is that they’re not the ones who should be building it in the first place. It is primarily because of Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy, which turned housing into something to make money from rather than live in, and forbade councils from investing rental income in building more housing, that there is such a drastic shortage. By 2018 there will be one million fewer affordable homes in the UK than there were in 1980, while the population has grown by seven million people. A change in legislation at the end of the last Labour government means that councils are finally allowed to spend their rental income surplus on building new homes. Research by Inside Housing shows that they have have already used their new powers to draw up plans for 15,000 units – with Hackney being the most ambitious, planning almost 2,500 new homes by 2020. Many councils are also setting up housing companies, to get around the government’s borrowing caps, from Newham and Greenwich to Wokingham and South Cambridgeshire. Will 2015 see more councils taking the lead?



3. More community land trusts in urban areas

One of the streets in Toxteth revdeveloped by the Granby Four Streets community land trust. Photograph: Lewis Jones/Assemble

The community land trust (CLT) is a housing model originally imported from the US, which keeps a plot of land in community ownership in perpetuity, with houses sold or rented at a rate that is permanently linked to local incomes. There are now more than 170 such groups in the UK, mostly in rural areas due to prohibitive land values in cities, but recent examples show how they can revive neglected inner-city sites. Granby Four Streets, in Liverpool’s maligned Toxteth, is an area that had been subject to 30 years of neglect and “managed decline”, until a group of residents got together and took the future of their streets into their own hands. Their recently formed CLT is now working to bring a number of empty homes back into use, with the aim of providing permanently affordable housing for the area. In east London, a CLT is creating 23 homes on the old St Clement’s hospital site, which will range from £140,000 to £285,000 – half the price of the 229 adjacent homes that will be sold at full market value to subsidise the cheaper ones. Momentum is building: a national CLT network was launched in July with a pot of £3m to encourage their growth in urban areas, and the charity Citizens UK has launched “a civil society manifesto” [PDF] for the 2015 general election that calls for half of all affordable housing provision to be built on community land trust sites – 750,000 homes by 2030.



4. Severe tax on empty homes

Over 635,000 homes lie empty across the country, 259,000 of which have been vacant for over six months, while homelessness figures and housing waiting lists continue to soar. The government has now allowed councils to charge 150% council tax on properties that have been empty for two years, but not all have put the policy into action – and it’s little deterrent for the top end of the market, at no more than £1,000 for even the largest homes. A Guardian investigation found that £350m of property is sitting vacant on the “billionaire’s row” of rotting mansions on Bishops Avenue in north London, mainly owned by overseas investors. The rise of such buy-to-leave investment is turning much of the city into a ghost town. Islington has mooted introducing a fine of £60,000 for homes that are left empty, having found that more than a third of new apartments built in the borough since 2008 have no registered voter living in them, or are marked as vacant. It’s the kind of punitive measure needed to ensure that the city remains a place people can still live, and doesn’t just become an empty three-dimensional extrusion of land values and savings accounts.

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