A reintroduction of homesteading – where empty homes are sold at a discount to people who then renovate them – could help bring some of England’s 710,000 empty homes back into use, new research finds, as a homesteading revival could help turn vacant properties into useful homes.
The charity Empty Homes writes:
To coincide with National Empty Homes Week (25th – 29th November), new research has been released looking at ways of bringing some of England’s 710,000 empty homes back into affordable use.
Independent research, undertaken by researchers at the University of Sheffield, but in collaboration with the charity Empty Homes, looked at how the number of empty homes in England could be reduced through a scheme known as homesteading.
Homesteading, is a process where empty homes are sold at a discount to people who renovate them to create their own homes. The concept was popular in the 1970’s and the 1980’s but has fallen almost entirely out of use over the last 20 years.
Due to the shortage of housing stock in the UK, the charity Empty Homes, believes that the time is now right for a national homesteading program to be introduced so that the process can help unlock some apparently intractable empty homes problems.
In particular, homesteading could make a real difference in the North of England where local authorities continue to hold a significant number of empty properties as a result of the housing market renewal programme (see Editors’ Note 1). These houses would have been demolished but the demise of the programme meant that they were spared as local authorities no longer had the funds to demolish them. With little public money available to bring them back into use, homesteading could offer local authorities a positive and sensible way forward in dealing with these empty properties.
Does Homesteading work? Yes. In 2012, the charity Empty Homes helped Stoke City Council develop a homesteading programme for two areas of the city where houses had previously been acquired for clearance. The ‘Houses for £1’ programme was launched in early 2013, allowing people to buy houses for £1 on condition they renovated them and lived in them as their sole home.
The programme made 35 houses available for sale, and proved incredibly popular with several thousand applications being received from prospective purchasers.
Similar schemes inspired by the Stoke programme have subsequently been launched in both Liverpool and Oldham.
Key findings from the research
The research found that homesteading:
· was simple to understand for local government officials, the media and the wider public.
· was being undertaken by a small but growing number of enthusiastic local authorities, social landlords and practitioners.
· was the subject of massive local demand.
· provided social landlords with an affordable and high-profile means of bringing empty properties back into use to meet local housing needs.
· provided opportunities for relatively low-income households to become home-owners.
The researchers identified a number of common characteristics that contributed to the success of existing homesteading schemes. These included:
· the championing of homesteading by energetic and enthusiastic local government officers.
· a pool of publicly-owned empty properties that had been acquired as a result of the now defunct housing market renewal programme
· a learning approach that included a willingness to innovate, take risks, develop creative approaches and learn from mistakes.
· a political commitment to bringing empty homes back into use .
· the careful selection of properties suitable for homesteading in terms of their structural condition and location.
· the availability of grant funding.
Key recommendations from the report:
Policy-makers should consider the following:
· Further encouragement of homesteading via the government’s Empty Homes funding with explicit targets for homesteading in each local authority area, i.e. a pre-determined percentage of empty homes should be brought back into use via homesteading.
· Publication of national guidance on homesteading for elected members, local authority officers, mortgage-lenders and prospective homesteaders, incorporating case studies and best practice advice.
· The completion of further research to:
· better understand the profiles and motivations of actual and potential homesteaders
· evaluate the effectiveness of current homesteading schemes and understand the geography of homesteading, its potential for stabilizing communities and the possible risks of gentrification
· better understand the role of crowd-sourcing in the reporting of empty homes and the identification of their owners
David Ireland OBE, Chief Executive of Empty Homes, said: ‘We know that Homesteading works. There is a clear demand from prospective homeowners for empty homes and this research shows that there are many things which policy makers can take on board which will enable a major expansion in the scale of homesteading in the UK.
‘We hope that this research will provide the spring-board to enable thousands of empty properties to be brought back into affordable use. We will continue to push for a national homesteading programme to be introduced.’
Lee Crookes and Win Greenhalgh, authors of the report, said: ‘There are over 710,000 empty properties in England alone and with over 1.2 million people on housing waiting lists throughout England, it makes total economic and social sense to introduce a scheme such as homesteading into the ‘housing toolbox’ of local authorities. All the research shows that homesteading works – it is now down to policy makers and politicians to support and extend the use of homesteading as part of their broader efforts to tackle the problem of empty homes.’
For Empty Homes see: http://www.emptyhomes.com/
Read the Press Release at: LINK
