Very Bristol solutions to the housing crisis

“The only places accepting rent at housing benefit rates have either got mice, damp or mice and damp,” says Carla, half jokingly.

Standing outside what could become her new home, the new 37-year-old mother explains why she’s interested in joining one of the emerging alternative solutions to Bristol’s chronic housing crisis.

“To have your own decent space, but one you can afford, is, well, it’s almost unheard of these days,” she adds, clutching her tiny baby to her shoulder.

Bristol’s property crisis has been bubbling over for years now. But with house prices in some areas rising by as much as 10 per cent annually, social social housing stock diminishing and private rental prices spiraling, the ability to put a decent roof over your head at a low cost is becoming ever more unreachable.

That’s partly why some people in Bristol are looking for alternative solutions to finding a secure home.

The city is no stranger to alternative – and often unusual – solutions to housing, what with the self-build experiment in St Werburgh’s, next to St Werburgh’s City Farm, and the Ashley Vale Self-Build Co-operative, next to the M32.

But with the housing market overheating like never before and support from central and local government, new groups are emerging in a bid to take the crisis into their own hands.

Bristol24/7 visited two of them.

An unusual conversion:

Think of all those empty, derelict and vast office buildings you walk past in Bristol in your neighbourhood, on your way to work and even in the very centre of the city.

Now think about the 13,000 people on the council’s housing waiting list, the many more thousands whose wages mean they will never own their own property, or even the hundreds of homeless sleeping rough on the streets.

It doesn’t take a genius to see there’s a link here somewhere – a link Abolish Empty Office Buildings (AEOB) is looking to connect.

After forming two years ago, the Bristol charity has just bought its first abandoned office block in St George where they broke ground on September 2 to develop six affordable apartments.

Elinor Kershaw, project manager on the new site, said the movement was born with a simple walk through Bristol city centre.

“It pained us to see the reality of homeless people sleeping under ‘to let’ signs of vast unused office spaces,” she said. “The inequality and injustice is just unnecessary.”

AEOB’s vision is to use its first property, purchased with funds raised from a community share offer and through an ethical mortgage with Bristol bank Triodos, as a platform to develop dilapidated and ignored sites around the city into low-cost homes for people who can’t get on the increasingly elusive ladder.

People like single mother Carla, who asked that her surname was withheld, and her tiny baby who are fed up with the insecurity of the overheated rental market and the conditions they are forced to live in.

“How many office buildings like this are just left empty?” Elinor asks, outside the site entrance with Carla on the first day of work. “And how many people like Carla are running out of options for a place to live?”

AEOB’s system works with the charity buying and owning the office through ethical investment or a mortgage, then letting to tenants on a secure basis at affordable rates.

Rental levels are based on local housing allowance rates, but organisers are hoping to drop below that in the future.

The charity will retain ownership of the property in order to keep low-cost rental property available long term, but tenants will form a co-operative to manage the building and have as much freedom as practically possible to operate the building as if it were their own. 

In the case of their first property, AEOB have a 15-year mortgage which can be paid off with affordable rents as the charity does not make a profit.

Contractors are being paid to do the substantial work, but tenants and other supporters also have the opportunity of paid work through the construction budget – Elinor included, who is hoping to gain experience of project management on the job.

Prospective residents have the chance to shape the way their living spaces will look and can even help with the finishing work. Alternatively, if their hands are tied with other work or children, they can do nothing and still become a tenant.

Elinor thinks this model is one part of the solution to an ever more exclusive housing market.

“There’s definitely a need to approach the housing problem in as many ways as possible. Property is always going to be an investment for those who can afford it.

“But if people are able to do it in a positive way to positively affect the housing situation, then there’s big potential.”

She adds: “We really think this is a flagship pilot. We want to scale up. If we can get to say £8 to 10 million in equity we are in the right areas to get investment from big industry or ethical pension funds and ethical investment advisors. Once we get the backing, we can make real inroads”

However, the charity is not running before it can walk, and understands all too well the difficulties with getting hold of buildings, derelict or not.

“It’s not just property investors who are sitting on land watching the value rise, councils are also ‘land banking’ all over the place,” she says, adding that the bureaucracy with going through local authorities put them off that route.

The enormous old probation offices, cleared this week by police, just off Wilder Street in St Paul’s is an ideal target, Elinor says, looking ahead.

“If we could get our hands on that we could do something really positive for housing, for the local community and even for the people squatting there.”

The community land trust:

£1 seems like a bargain for an old school with planning permission to convert into flats and new houses around a courtyard, bang on a commuter route to town and in an up-and-coming area.

You’d get a decent return if this was your traditional investment.

But it’s not. The land on Fishponds Road, adjacent to Eastville Park, was purchased by the Bristol Community Land Trust (BCLT), a not for profit organisation set up in 2010 with the aim of pulling together groups to buy plots and, in some cases, build their own homes.

It’s an idea backed by the Government and the city council, who approved the sale of the dilapidated, but beautiful, stone building.

Construction got under way earlier this year, with councillors breaking ground with shiny spades in front of the cameras.

Halfway into the project and the dwellings are rising slowly out of the ground, under the safe watch of Jones Building Group, a construction company contracted by the BCLT to carry out the main works.

The project is funded by a loan from Community Land and Finance,  a community interest company, set up to assist community-led groups. There is also a grant from the Homes and Communities Agency and Bristol City Council.

The land is currently on lease from the council under a contract which converts the property to a freehold once the full building work has been carried out.

Homes are available under a shared ownership scheme, where the BCLT retains 39.5 per cent of the homes.

This means a three-bedroom house can be bought for as little as £118,046, and a studio flat for £69,617.

Abigail Kennedy, 37, is one of the lucky few planning to move into a house with her three-year-old son Theo.

As a self-employed costume maker and single mum, she’s found owning her own place to raise her child an ever more unrealistic dream over the last few years.

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted, a bit of security,” she says. “We moved house four times in the first two years of Theo’s life and it was tough, really tough.”

Abigail is one of the lucky ones who managed to get onto the oversubscribed list of prospective tenants here on Fishponds Road.

A list so large that BCLT have already begun work on their second project in Lockleaze – 36 new homes, some apartments and some self-build, off Shaldon Road.

Again, the land will be bought by the BCLT and divided up, depending on demand, into social housing, shared ownership schemes and plots for people to build their homes how they want.

The trust takes no profit cut and ensures security by not letting the land fall back into the open market, where the problems with supply and demand are so acute.

“It’s all part of the answer,” says Anna Maloney, development officer at the BCLT. “Increasingly I find people ringing me up and saying they want that alternative and they don’t want to be involved in this over-heated market. People want to find their own solutions to the housing problems.”

This pool of people, she says, are usually earning no-where near enough to afford a mortgage on the open market and are earning slightly too much to be considered high enough up the enormous social housing list to realistically get a council home.

She adds: “We are all obsessed with property prices. But there’s a big group of people out there who say they aren’t interested in that.

“They just want somewhere for their kids to grow up that’s not a modern flat they are about to get turfed out of in two months.”

Jackson Moulding, vice chairman of the National Self Build Association and director of Ecomotive, who has been helping oversee the project, said there’s a “real desire” in Bristol for these types of builds.

“The demand is just really strong in this city at the moment. People want to start providing houses for themselves – something affordable and something they can be involved with from the start.”