Community-led housing takes various forms, including community land trusts (around 300 in England and Wales), co-housing units, mutual home ownership societies, and housing co-operatives, all planning their own affordable, low carbon homes. In England and Wales they have built or renovated around 1,700 affordable homes, and there are over 5,000 more in the pipeline.
Cwmpas’s Communities Creating Homes programme is Wales’s only official community-led housing hub with a team of accredited advisors, and is currently supporting fifty community-led housing groups in Wales.
In planning terms, affordable housing means homes that are available to people who can’t afford regular market prices. That can apply to both affordable rental and home ownership, and applies not just when the home is first occupied, but also for anyone who lives there later – what is known as ‘affordable in perpetuity’.
Some of the community-led housing groups we’re supporting are delivering affordable homes for themselves, like Gwyr Community Land Trust. This group of local families in Swansea is planning a co-housing scheme of fourteen affordable homes.
Also in Swansea are Golem Housing Co-operative, a diverse group of individuals with similar interests who have been living co-operatively since 2012.
Some groups are working in partnership with housing associations and local authority partners to deliver housing for local people, like Nolton and Roch Community Land Trust and Solva Community Land Trust, both in Pembrokeshire.
Nefyn Town Trust in Pwllheli is a community-led housing organisation established well over 100 years ago, which is working to develop homes for rent to locals at affordable prices.
Other community-led housing groups are providing housing to meet a specific need, like Dream Home Swansea, a co-operative development led by young people with learning disabilities who are determined to have choice and control over their future homes and community.
In community-led housing, a group of individuals with a shared vision decide what kind of homes and communities they want to live in.
Community-led housing projects are based on democracy. The community focuses on what’s important for them, with the individuals who will live in the homes deciding what they want and need.
Wales doesn’t currently have the right number of homes available, nor the right type of homes, nor homes in the right places.
Sadly the current housing system, UK-wide, is not fit for purpose.
In Wales, the aim is to supply an additional 20,000 new low carbon social homes for rent by the end of this Senedd term.
Community-led housing groups can play an important role in helping councils, developers and investors to reach that target, by creating genuinely affordable homes designed and managed for, and by, the local community – especially now that community-led housing is recognised in Planning Policy Wales.
Indeed, the Welsh Government sees community-led homes as part of the solution to meeting their target of 20,000 social homes, alongside registered social landlords, local authorities, and private developers.
Objections to community-led housing projects tend to suggest that the concept is too new, or too different.
That’s just not true – community land trusts are a town planning idea that has been alive and well since the nineteenth century when housing co-operatives were a big part of the garden city movement.
There are challenges though.
The cost and complexity of submitting a planning application is already prohibitive, but can appear as a total barrier for community groups which are sometimes asked to jump through additional planning hoops – or are ignored altogether.
There can be issues with access to finance, securing the support of development partners, and securing planning consent and access to land.
But the Welsh Government strongly supports community-led housing, and local planning authorities should too.
Those fifty community groups and organisations that we’re supporting can deliver over three hundred affordable, low-carbon homes to people who need them.
Community-led housing encourages wider regeneration and placemaking by turning small, infill sites into homes – sites which larger developers wouldn’t be interested in.
The community-led process can help combat individual isolation and loneliness, develop new skills which boost confidence, competence, and employability, and grow supportive communities which take great pride in the homes they have created for themselves.
Community-led housing also keeps assets and investment within the community, growing the local economy and boosting resilience and opportunity.
Our ineffective planning system means that the target of 20,000 new social homes is unlikely to be delivered.
That makes it even more vital that community-led housing groups should be seen, and supported, as partners in the planning and development process.
These are groups which have creative solutions to address the housing crisis, solutions which benefit individuals, communities, the economy, and the environment.
Cwmpas’s Communities Creating Homes project is Wales’s only community-led housing hub, and offers support and advice to new and existing organisations looking to develop community-led housing schemes in Wales.
We’d love local authorities to add their support to the planning process, and maximise the opportunity for community-led housing to address the barriers to delivering more social and affordable homes.
Contact co-op.housing@cwmpas.coop for further information on the support available from the Communities Creating Homes programme.
