Sustainable Rural Communities in the 21st Century

New proposals to tackle rural housing shortages

Housing Minister Iain Wright has announced new powers to help keep homes affordable for communities in rural areas.


The new measures mean that rural communities with severe housing shortages could be designated as protected areas, ensuring affordable housing is retained for local families.


Affordable housing providers in these areas will be able to retain a share in new shared ownership homes, or have the first buy back option. This will ensure these homes remain available for future families in the local community.


The new proposals could also see more people being able to cut the cost of getting on the housing ladder through Community Land Trusts.


Graham Garbutt, our Chief Executive, has welcomed the proposals:

"The lack of affordable housing continues to be the single most pressing  problem faced by rural people. This is leading to the loss of young people and  increasing age imbalance, as well as undermining the sustainability of rural  communities."

"Now is the time to be bringing forward proposals that will make a  real difference backed up with funding already allocated to provide affordable  homes in rural towns and villages."


Visit the Communities and Local Government website to find out more

Comments

1
This will certainly help - perhaps my children will leave home one day after all. Steve, Somerset
Posted by  at 4:14pm on Thursday, 9th October 2008
2
Thanks for your comments Steve. I'm sure a lot of people hope that these measures mean that their children, and other young people in rural areas, will have more opportunity to get on to the housing ladder while staying within their communities.
Posted by Russell Tanner  at 4:43pm on Thursday, 9th October 2008
3
This is a real landmark. I believe that we should be more bold and allow rural indigenous people to re-establish indigenous vernacular rural housing with low embodied energy local natural resources. the prime one being green timber. Rural people need more space to grow food etc, and with assistance could ser up their own self build. If we use local resources and training and aim at 100 year lifespan and adaptability in the housing we can use it as a carbon sink and provide sustainable rural employment backed up by lowering commuting and increasing environmental awareness. steve dorset
Posted by  at 8:57am on Tuesday, 14th October 2008
4
Thanks Steve, hopefully these proposals will allow communities to be more involved with the decision making that can help them to become more sustainable, both environmentally and in a wider sense.
Posted by Russell Tanner  at 12:57pm on Tuesday, 14th October 2008
5
thanks for the comment i am concerned that your answer misses my point. You separate "environment" from "wider sense" . The basis of sustainability is that the environment must be central as a climatic regulator with mans labours supporting this. How we live on the planet and the settlement pattern we demonstrate wxpresses this, the environment and the wider picture are sustainable development. Sorry if that sounds wrong but as someone working on these solutions with 48yrs rural experience, it is hard to get through to the right people try; greenwoodfutures.co.uk
Posted by Steve King  at 11:15am on Wednesday, 15th October 2008
6

Sorry Steve, I think perhaps I didn't phrase my previous response very well. When I refered to the 'wider sense', I think I meant that although environment is quite rightly central, for communities to be sustainable we also need to look at them in terms of social, cultural and economic wellbeing.


We recently produced a publication 'Planning for Sustainable Rural Communities: The big picture' that I think can put this far more eloquently than I can.

Posted by Russell Tanner  at 11:28am on Wednesday, 15th October 2008
7

i hope that one day lloyd can afford a house with his ema

 

Posted by  at 3:18pm on Monday, 20th October 2008
8
My reading of this is that small flats could be sold by CLTs for as little as £60k....I wonder how much larger family houses of say 100 sq  m would need to be sold for to recover construction costs....?    
Posted by  at 3:14pm on Thursday, 23rd October 2008
9
I believe that CLTs keep prices down by separating the land from its use. The land and its value are held in trust. As the land is often the most valuable/expensive element of a property, this keeps the price of each flat or house much lower.
Posted by Russell Tanner  at 3:31pm on Thursday, 23rd October 2008
10
And the answer to Post 8 is.......circa £110,000 based on my estimate of construction costs (excluding land) at £1,100 per sq m.  Construction costs will of course be significantly more if the homes are built to Level 3 or 4 of the Code for Sustainable Homes.......
Posted by  at 3:56pm on Thursday, 6th November 2008
11
Thanks for your post. Could you give some more details on how you arrive at that estimate? I think it would be really useful to understand how the costs of building are calculated.
Posted by Russell Tanner  at 4:01pm on Thursday, 6th November 2008
12
I work in the development of affordble housing.  All of our schemes are fully costed by Surveyors and assessed by the Corporation against Value For Money indicators before funding is approved.   In my experience, RSLs are currently struggling to deliver Code 3 homes on rural exception sites at below £1,400 per sq m (with plot values of c.£10k).  However, rather than pure construction of the dwellings, some of these costs are due to infrastructure requirements such as SUDS drainage and utility / highway upgrades that all have to be funded through the affordable housing schemes.  Exception sites, by their very nature have no open market housing from which to cross-subsidise the infrastructure costs.  I fail to see how CLTs will be any different unless they stick to extremely small sites where they will then not achieve ecomomies of scale on the construction side....... 
Posted by  at 9:05am on Friday, 7th November 2008
13
Thank you, that's very informative
Posted by Russell Tanner  at 9:12am on Friday, 7th November 2008
14
Hello, Russell,

Just a thought re this topic: might it be worth your going back to some of the RSLs/HAs/Projects featured in the Best Practice housing case studies?

Cheers,

Gordon Morris
Posted by  at 2:23pm on Friday, 7th November 2008
15

Thanks Gordon, well reminded! The case studies include some good examples of projects that have been able to supply affordable housing at prices as low as £60k.

Posted by Russell Tanner  at 6:22pm on Friday, 7th November 2008

What do you think?

You are now commenting anonymously. LOGIN to add comments attributed to you.


Please note: anonymous comments will only appear on the site after they have been moderated and approved by CRC.