Having an impact through innovation in housing

AS the housing crisis continues and homelessness across the board carries on rising year on year, there’s never been a better time to start thinking outside the box.

Steve Hoey, CEO of Turning Lives Around and Chair of the Leeds Homelessness Prevention Forum, gives his thoughts on the current situation and where he thinks there are opportunities to get creative in our approach to eliminating homelessness...

The housing crisis is real and as this tent - pitched outside Merrion House, the home of many Leeds City Council services - shows, its impact is being felt on our doorstep.

The number of families in temporary accommodation currently stands at 400 households and rising.

Around 26,000 households are on the housing waiting list. While not all are homeless, there’s a massive shortage of affordable housing in Leeds.

At the last count, 76 people were sleeping rough in Leeds city centre but this figure doesn’t capture everyone; women tend to be more hidden in their homelessness.

Temporary accommodation in Leeds is costing the local authority an increasing and unsustainable amount.

This situation is untenable, but Leeds is a growing city; a lot of people are coming to live here putting significant pressure on housing in general. While the city has done well in building new council housing – thousands in fact – we continue to lose thousands through the Right to Buy scheme to the extent that the material gain is less than a hundred new homes over recent years.

Right to Buy is just one of the root causes of the current housing crisis. Housing associations and councils, as well as other providers, would love to build more homes, but there hasn’t been enough funding coming by way of grants from government, land is both scarce and costly and the cost of building, since the Pandemic, has rocketed. These are all factors going against those wanting to build affordable homes.

That said, there is a glimmer of light on the horizon. The recent Comprehensive Spending Review has £39 billion over 10 years - £3.9 billion a year – going into providing affordable homes. There’s a lot of detail still unknown – the grant rate and sort of tenures to name but two – and it’s not as big a deal as it sounds – in 2009/10, Gordon Brown’s National Affordable Homes Programme put £3.248 billion (worth £5 billion a year today) into new social housing – but it's a big step in the right direction.

So, what more can be done? The answer is plenty, but we need to get creative, and looking around, there is much that’s being done locally that’s both innovative and impactful.

Community-led housing

Leeds has a long history of community led housing which comes in many guises including a strong cooperative sector. One example called Frontline dates back some 30 years when a group of unemployed black men got together, project managed by Claude Hendrickson MBE, with the support of Leeds City Council and Leeds Federated Housing Association, to build their own homes, building 12 semi-detached houses in Chapeltown.

More recently we have seen a couple of great examples of co-housing developments in Leeds. This form of community-led housing is where a group of people build their own homes on a development which usually features shared facilities. LILAC – Low Impact Living Affordable Community – in Bramley comprises 20 eco-build households while Chapeltown Co-housing (ChaCo) features 29 modular dwellings and a common house with an emphasis on sustainability and cultural diversity.

Modular Units

Self-contained modular units can be craned in as either emergency accommodation or for longer term use. A fantastic example of this can be seen in Cambridge where community-based charity Jimmy’s, which provides support and housing to rough sleepers, has 22 modular homes across four sites.

In Leeds, St George’s Crypt’s partnership with Leeds City Council and Clarion led to nine units being provided for homeless people in 2024. This approach is something we are interested in doing more of locally.  The Diocese of Leeds have recently launched a housing programme, and I am speaking to them about potentially working together to make use of decommissioned and vacant land and buildings.

Harnessing empty homes

Towards the end of 2024, there were some 700,000 empty / unfurnished homes in England, 261,471 of which had been vacant for six months so classed as ‘long term’ empty. Creating a new home from purchasing and renovating an existing property can be achieved much quicker than building from scratch even with the difficulties associated with tracking down the owners of these long-term empty buildings.

Renovating derelict homes is something that Canopy Housing and LATCH do extremely well locally. There is a lot of social value in this sort of programme as in some cases, future tenants are involved in the renovation work, making them more invested in the property and the community it’s located in and acquiring new skills as well as a home. These skills can lead to work in social enterprises, something I raised with Chancellor Rachel Reeves, one of our local MPs, recently when she visited TLA.

There are lots of innovative options open to us, but they don’t come without hurdles. Top of these is a lack of money and the ability to borrow funds, the difficulty of attaining land, planning any new build and the cost of building. The government grant rate currently stands at 30-49%; if this were to increase to 50-60% then the amount needing to be borrowed would be far less, increasing the number of homes that could be built.

Then there’s the time and effort that it takes. The average new build project takes seven years to complete with the process of raising the money, buying the land and getting planning permission taking just as long, if not longer, than the actual build itself. Compare this to the 18 months – two years needed to purchase and renovate a derelict property.

Stumbling blocks aside, I believe there is enough energy, drive and enthusiasm in Leeds to tackle this housing crisis head on. Together, working with partners in the city, we can unlock some of these ideas, lobby the Labour government for money and raise funds through such initiatives as social investment and crowdfunding as well as borrowing from mainstream sources.

At TLA we are exploring ways we can raise development finance with a priority of investing in bricks and mortar and buying properties that will not only provide a home for a previously homeless tenant today but can be relet to other vulnerable clients in future.

The current homeless and housing situation is bleak but there is hope as well as that elusive light at the end of the tunnel. We may not reach that light in the next five years, but we do have the potential – if we work together – to reach it in the longer term.