7 Oct 2014
Darren Woodiwiss of Transition Market Harborough reports on the group’s attempts to influence development in their town, which have focused on the one remaining undeveloped site in the town…
“Market Harborough is a picturesque market town situated in South Leicestershire nestled up against the Northamptonshire border. It is a relatively prosperous town on the Midland mainline and as such has a large and growing commuter population.
Market Harborough was listed in the top 10 happiest communities in New Economics Foundation’s happiness survey a few years ago and also in the Halifax Building Society’s “Top ten most desirable places to live”.
Traditionally, due to its placement at the head of the Welland valley and being surrounded by “strong pasture”, Market Harborough was a stop off place to fatten up cattle when being driven to southern markets. Last year I read in a news article that Market Harborough’s population grew by 8% (I presume a 2011/12 figure) and was the second fastest growing community in the UK.
The pressures
Harborough District Council (HDC) has its housing targets to achieve, and within the district Market Harborough is by far the largest settlement, and so the council has elected to build a huge estate (1500-1800 houses or 10% increase) on the north west edge of town.
When the new NPPF came into force last year, HDC became one of the 45% of councils at that time not to have implemented a Local Plan although it has a number of out of date policies held over, as a result the NPPF’s primary directive “A presumption in favour of ‘sustainable’ housing’ has primacy”. In other words, no planning applications can be refused apart from on technical grounds.
Market Harborough has no direct political representation in the form of a parish or town council and so the Civic society has a group that monitor and respond to planning applications on the behalf of the town. HDC recently lost a planning appeal and the inspector found that the housing target for the district was too low, following a review by externally consultants a new target has been implemented which is now around 600 per year for the next 5 years (I am advised it is actually 4000 dwellings up to 2030). In an effort to speed up delivery of new developments HDC has removed the Affordable Homes Contribution Levy from developers. Market Harborough is incredibly “inbuilt”, there are no scraps of land left as these have all been built upon… apart from one (more on this later).
TTMH has not campaigned against any development as we do not see it being our remit, however we did participate as individuals in the “consultation” into the Council’s Core Spatial Strategy. Although the leader of the council described the draft document as “woolly-worded and contradictory” and the multiple choice consultation paper was rejected by most that I have spoken to, the draft was voted in without a single word being changed.
Difficulties faced by TTMH
Access to land
When land does become available it is snapped up by cash buyers, from enquiries these seem to be equestrian-based purchases and from the traveling community who also want land for their horses. Traditional farmers also value the land, one of our group is a smallholder and has stated that she would not sell any of her land as she would not want to see the strong pasture lost.
As the community is growing rapidly, and there are no limits placed on the ultimate growth of the town, any land near the settlement is potential building land and therefore already has options on from developers or the owners will not sell deeming the land to have value as future development land.
Gravitas
In order for HDC to take TTMH seriously in our proposals we need to have delivered previously, as we have no access to land for projects this will not happen.
Capacity
Being a small volunteer group, when we do gain traction on a project it is difficult to meet with officers as they like to meet during their working day… which happens to be our working day as well.
Opportunities
In an effort to find some good in the massive airfield farm development we have looked at the master plan which stated there would be the provision of a school, public house and shop. We have made the following proposals.
Desire 1
That we form a development trust and are allowed to build the school, public house and shop to passive Haus (Schoolhaus) standards with the profits going to the community.
Desire 2
That the community be allowed to form not-for-profit cooperatives to run the public house and store.
We are currently working with a local land holding charity with the view of planting a community orchard on a small field of theirs close to a nearby village. We are also working with stakeholders to see if we can upgrade a cycle path to include forage for wildlife and humans over a 1 mile section of the route as it exits Harborough.
N2 community farm project
We contacted HDC in 2009 regarding some derelict garages sandwiched between Newcombe Street and Naseby Square (hence the name – ‘N squared’) and the potential for a community farm garden. The initial result of this was that the council regaining control of the site from a private letting company and then demolishing the garages due to their semi derelict state and regular use by drug takers.
On the site is the remnants of a traditional orchard (BPAP list of priority habitats to preserve) and with the help of local residents we have held two moth-trapping events to evaluate the areas wildlife value with some interesting results.
The plan for this site has not been finalised yet but we would probably look to preserve and extend the existing orchard area, create space for biodiversity (ponds, wildflowers etc.), potentially have an apiary, create space for the community to come together and for children to play safely and last but not least to have a shared growing space. It would be nice if we could do this within Permaculture principles.
Last year the Council finally made the decision to sell the land for housing and advertised it as suitable for 20 homes even though the site has limited access which according to County Council guidance documents would mean only 5-6 houses potentially being allowed on the 1.5 acre site. The bidding for this plot closed in May and we have had it confirmed that there were bids received for the site. As part of this process the community was offered a small grassed area (about the size of two allotments) for our proposed use.
At a meeting a few weeks ago regarding this grassed area, we heard that the offer on the site was disappointingly low and the Council invited the community to submit a proposal on how we would use the land, how the community will be engaged and how we would raise the money (circa £150k+).
To raise this kind of money will certainly be a challenge for the group in this current climate of austerity, we are currently writing our proposal, reviewing grant giving organisations and we have the support of the lovely people at the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens. The site is not big enough to earn enough revenue for debit finance so it looks like we will have to be creative in how we approach this hurdle and we would be very interested in hearing how other Transition groups have managed this.
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7 Oct 2014
I had the great honour the other day of formally opening the UK’s first urban mushroom farm. City centres are full of unused office space, either due to lack of demand, or due to developers mothballing them for future development. What use might be found for them? And might a creative interpretation of the term “market garden” help make a new generation of urban farmers viable?
Adam Sayner and Eric Jong of Fungi Futures CIC came up with the idea of GroCycle Urban Mushroom Farm as a creative way to use both empty offices, and waste coffee grounds. I have a bit of a vested interest in their work. In 2012, at the first Totnes Local Entrepreneur Forum, I was part of a group who pitched the idea of a craft brewery social enterprise, and they pitched Fungi Futures, a business they had already started on the nearby Dartington estate, making “Grow Kits” from the town’s waste coffee grounds.
We have since then worked closely alongside each other, they now use the brewery’s spent grains for their mushroom spawn which is then mixed into their coffee waste, and earlier this year, for the 2014 Forum, we brewed ‘Circular Stout’ (“the Circular Economy in a glass”), a stout flavoured with their oyster mushrooms (it was delicious, and makes an appearance in this video of the event).
The step up from producing Grow Kits to an Urban Farm is quite a big one. They’ve been getting set up there for several months now, and the event I was invited to was their official launch, attended by about 40 people: journalists; people who buy their mushrooms; people who supply them with coffee; people who were just intrigued to see what they’re up to.
The offices they inhabit they get free of charge. The landlord is happy to see something happening inside the space and they’re their no longer having the liability for the business rates on the property. Eric and Adam are currently in the final stages of a fascinating process of trying to establish that, as a business, they should be exempted from business rates. After a detailed reading of the legislation about what is and isn’t exempted from business rates, they wrote to the Valuation Office Agency to say:
Our primary activity in the building will be the production of Oyster mushrooms. As far as I can see from the info found at the following link it appears we could be exempt from business rates as the building is, in effect, a ‘market garden’.
The passage in question states:
“A building is an agricultural building if it is not a dwelling and
a) it is occupied together with agricultural land and is used solely in connection with agricultural operations on that or other agricultural land,
or
b) it is or forms part of a market garden and is used solely in connection with agricultural operations at the market garden.”
Their argument is that their business qualifies as a market garden. They elaborate:
It is not necessary that the plants should be grown in natural soil; it has been held that a building used for the propagation and growing of mushrooms in trays filled with compost specially prepared from wheat straw and horse manure was a “market garden” – see J Beveridge & Co Ltd v Perth and Kinross Assessor [1967] LVAC RA 482. Nor need the building have what might be regarded as the traditional appearance of a market garden – a disused multi-floor cotton mill utilised for the growing of mushrooms would appear to satisfy the term “market garden”. Similarly a building in an urban area growing bean sprouts would satisfy the term “market garden”. However, if the product was then packed together with other bought-in vegetables, this part of the premises would not be exempt.
A final decision from the Agency is expected any day now. They expect not a full exemption, but somewhere around three-quarters of their business rates to be exempted. This interpretation of “market garden” opens the possibility for other imaginative urban food businesses to follow the same path. Here’s a short film they made about the Farm:
Coffee grounds are collected by bicycle from around Exeter, and brought to the Farm. They are then mixed in a large compost drum with the mushroom spawn innoculant. This is transferred into bags in the incubation innoculation room, shelves lined with innoculated bags that will be used for their Grow Kits, or longer cylindrical tube things that, once the fungus has established itself, will be transferred to the ‘Fruiting Room’.
Entering the Fruiting Room is an eerie experience. It’s somewhere between an on-land coral reef and something out of a science fiction film. It’s a large clear plastic tent, kept to a certain temperature and humidity level. The fruiting bags hang from the ceiling, and from them burst oyster mushrooms, beautiful, pristine, alien-looking. Oyster mushrooms are very beautiful, very valuable, and as I found out when I got the bunch of them that I was given home, rather delicious with butter, garlic and a little bit of cream. They are also awesomely good for you. Check these out…
Standing by the window of the room in which the fruiting mixes are tumbled in the compost tumbler, buildings the same as that inhabited by the GroCycle Urban Mushroom Farm run off into the distance, all empty apart from the shops on the ground floor. To the best of my knowledge, GroCycle is the first urban food-producing enterprise to move in, but many more could follow. The BBC recently ran the story of ‘Growing Underground’, growing food in unused sections of the London Underground.
There are lots of interesting and innovative food businesses that could find a foothold in the empty office blocks of England. Salads, sprouting beans, perhaps hops harvested from up the sides of buildings. Perhaps ground floors could be converted into the kind of incredible hydroponic/aquaculture system I saw in Milwaukee last year in the Growing Power project. Perhaps even when the building’s owners actually get round to redeveloping them they might design urban agriculture into them from the start? Flat roofs for urban farms, balconies for fruit production, maximising south-facing spots for food growing.
As I headed home with my little bag of Oyster mushrooms, I felt I had had a taste not just of one of the world’s most delicious fungi, but also a taste of what rethinking waste management, urban job creation and food production could look like. It was a tasty vision indeed.
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3 Oct 2014
Paul Chatterton is one of the founders of the Lilac Cohousing project in Leeds. BY day he works as a geographer at Leeds University. Lilac is a fascinating model for a new, more equitable and ecological approach to providing affordable housing. When we met Paul to learn more, we started by asking him what, in his opinion, is wrong with the current development model?
“Well I suppose if we take a focus from the view of Lilac there would be three things. The first is that it doesn’t seem to be able to develop or deliver low-impact housing that represents the kind of step change in carbon reduction that we need. The second thing is that it doesn’t really allow us to lock in affordability and perpetuity for future generations, which is a big issue given the drastic disjuncture between house prices and wages. The third thing is, it doesn’t seem to have an ability to build the meaningful sorts of relationships which communities are based on.
It just perpetuates this really corrosive individualism around being an individual owner-occupier, or indeed being at the mercy of private rented landlords or being stigmatised as a social housing renter. So put those things together and you’ve got an incredible dysfunctionality. The whole thing’s shot to pieces. We really need some quite hot-footed experimentation to respond to that.
Surely if we want the economy to grow again we need to build houses?
Where we live in Leeds for example, Leeds has got its own targets of 77,000 new houses needed in the next few decades. So therefore, if we look at what we already deliver, the big volume builders deliver most of this stuff. The growth areas which really need to be promoted around community and co-operative housing which is a tiny segment of the market can really grow, can really flourish in this context.
Co-operative housing in the UK is 0.5% of the market. So it has a huge opportunity to grow. As we build these really big, ambitious targets, some of which are actually questionable because we could talk about how we live as well, and the fact that people are under-occupying housing. But as we build houses, we’ve really got to rebalance delivery models.
The push at the moment for building absolutely everywhere – as communities now it feels like with a presumption in favour of development, planning authorities now getting a housing bonus for every new house that’s approved, it’s harder and harder for communities to resist unwanted inappropriate development. What are your thoughts on what communities can actually do to resist this stuff at this stage?
There are certainly lots of things. One interesting aspect which is possibly undervalued in the debate is the need to retrofit what we’ve actually got. We’ve got vast amounts of housing stock and basically how they retrofit it, so the millions of homes in the UK, how we take the terraces in the cities, the semis in the suburbs, and start to think how we can retrofit low-carbon infrastructure, affordability, different tenure models, and how we start to build in community infrastructure.
Take a terrace, create shared ownership across them; start knocking down back gardens and sharing gardens, take the middle home and make it into a common house where there’s a shared laundry, dining facilities, office space, meeting space. So you build in that conviviality infrastructure in the already existing streets. You can do this across every neighbourhood and street across the UK, it would be a really exciting proposition, retrofitting the stuff into what we’ve already got. We’re stuck with it, right? We’re not going to start mass clearances again like we did in the 60s.
How did Lilac come about?
It’s an interesting 6 year story of perseverance. There was a small group of us about 6 years ago who started to think about how we could live differently in the future. We started to throw around ideas, can we live co-operatively, can we build places where we genuinely would want to bring up a family, where we’re not going to feel isolated, that we can afford. So a lot of this stuff really necessitated ripping up the rule book and starting again. How do we work within and also beyond the current planning system, what are the co-operative affordable models we can use, shared ownership, and how do you really build an affordable low-impact house? We were always committed to straw bale building.
Lilac as an entity, as it emerged, we were really committed to building with straw, to being a co-operative and to building a strong community. So these different ideas came together in this lovely word Lilac, which stands for low impact living affordable community. It was a 6 year story of perseverance with loads of twists and turns, making deals, negotiating hard, sticking to our values, building our membership, so much the group has to do to get from idea to delivery.
And what is it?
In a nutshell, Lilac is a co-operative co-housing project. It’s comprised of 20 homes of different sizes, so there are some one bed, some two bed flats and three and four bed houses, so different sizes. There’s a big common house in the middle. If I was to describe Lilac, it’s a big 0.7 acre site. It’s an old Victorian school which was demolished and we bought it after the demolition. The houses are based around a big horseshoe shape with the common house in the middle. There’s a big pond and shared landscaping. We’ve pushed the car parks to the edge so the kids – and everyone – have got loads of car free space to play in. It’s like a blueprint of housing in the future that we can achieve right now.
It feels very different. When contractors and visitors walk into the site, they say – what is this place! Eco-Butlins? A retirement community? We have no reference points in Britain for doing things so radically differently. It becomes an aesthetic shock. People are just so overwhelmed when they arrive – and we can certainly link some photos to this interview so you can see what we’re talking about.
Why straw bale? What did that make possible that concrete blocks don’t?
There’s a number of reasons why we used straw. One is that it’s abundantly available in the UK and in the North, so we could really look at a very quick, affordable build. IT’s a really cheap build method, it offers great insulation values, so it’s a wonderful high-insulating product to use for building low carbon buildings. It’s got a wonderful feel. You coat it with lime render. We hooked up with a guy who’s running a firm called Modsel, who creates a pre-fabricated panel. So the homes go up very quickly. So that’s the low carbon side of it.
Straw and timber and lime are the three products which the house I live in now is built from. Three naturally carbon sequestering products. So in its use, tonnes and tonnes of carbon is locked up into the home, rather than bricks and blocks of cement which takes tonnes and tonnes of energy and CO2, pumps that CO2 into the atmosphere to create. So we’re on the carbon negative side rather than carbon positive.
On the community side, straw’s great because it really allows that hands on building with your community. It can be used for community building, that process of building a community. People would come down, we had a day in an off-site factory building the straw bale panels. Throwing straw bales around, putting the lime on. So it really gave people a connection with building their homes. So on those two levels it’s really great.
So the straw bale panels were tensioned and plastered before they came onto the site?
That’s right. They were made offsite in what we call a “flying factory”. The timber is high precision cut in Austria. It’s a shame that we haven’t got a supply chain in the UK. I think the North of Scotland is the nearest we’ve got and they’re working on that. So high precision cut, glue laminated timber arrives, so do the straw bales from the neighbouring fields, and so does the lime render, which is sprayed on.
All three products get put together relatively quickly into these straw bale panels. A tractor brings them to the site and they go up like Lego bricks. Basically, they come in the back of a tractor, you get a crane and they just get put together. So you can see your home go up in a matter of days. It’s very exciting.
What’s the economic model? These aren’t open market housing. You’ve developed quite a different, unique model for this.
That’s right. That’s what really gets people’s interest in this. It’s called a Mutual Home Ownership Society (MHOS), and we really want to see this replicated beyond Lilac. The basics of an MHOS is that because we’re a membership co-operative, everyone owns equity in their home. You buy equity by paying 35% of your net income to the society. So every month, every member pays 35% of their net income. All these 35%s go into a central pot which pays one mortgage we’ve got with the bank (Triodos Bank). That pays the corporate mortgage. So there’s no individual mortgages.
The interesting thing is you can take that equity away when you leave Lilac. So you buy equity which you can sell when you leave. The interesting thing here, this is, I think, the real wow factor behind it, is that the value of equity is linked to wages and not local house prices. So the value of your equity really flatlines or just dribbles up at just 1.5% a year as it is now calibrated to. What this means is we’ve taken the speculation and the commodification out of housing. So you can’t speculate on houses in Lilac. If you jump out of the housing market into Lilac, it might be difficult to get back into the housing market, but we really see what we’re doing as making a stand against rampant speculation. It’s got to start somewhere and we’re part of that.
So it’s quite a big deal. We’re a financial co-operative first and foremost and that’s a real stand against this corrosive individualism we’ve seen through the housing market and the housing bubbles over the last few years, especially since 2008.
The 35% of your income that you pay every month, that builds up as an amount. So you’re saying that when you leave you can take that in its entirety when you go?
Not in its entirety. And that’s where actually it does feel quite conventional. This mutual home ownership is not too dissimilar to home ownership. Every month, your monthly payments go towards buying your equity. When you leave, we apply some appreciation, the increase in average earnings, and we also apply some depreciation by which we take a bit of equity from people to pay for their use of capital items. If you take a roof on a house, for example, it might last 40 years. If you’ve lived in Lilac for 10 years, we deduct the value of 10/40ths of a roof from you when you leave. So in year 40 there’s a surplus to pay for those new roofs. It’s a little bit different to conventional home ownership in that sense.
We’ve got quite a fancy model which runs all this. We’ve got together with some great software engineers and created a piece of software called Dwell which runs all this. There are a lot of complex algorithms which run all this. Rather than it being a bedroom operation with people scratching their heads and trying to run it from their bedrooms, we professionalised it all and paid for some nice software. We’re trying to lay down bits of infrastructure that other co-ops and community housing projects can use in our wake. Without these bits of the jigsaw, it’s actually quite difficult for people to get this stuff off the ground themselves.
But presumably in order for that to work, you need to make sure you have a mixture of incomes in there. If everybody’s signing on or on very low incomes, it’s not going to generate enough money, surely?
That’s right, and we need to be clear that Lilac is what we call intermediate housing. This is that bit in the middle which is not very well served in the UK. This is defined as housing which is of greater value that would serve those lowest income centiles and it’s more affordable housing than those who could afford to buy their own home. So it’s the bit in the middle which currently is not being provided for in terms of the builders. OK, so we need more social housing, so we need to make an important argument that this should not take away from social housing.
So what we need in a mutual home ownership society is people with minimum net incomes. What we do for each house type is place a minimum net income which generates enough money to pay for the debt associated with that house. They can be quite modest. For example, we’ve got a two bed on the site and the couple who live there have a combined income of about £15,000 a year. Between them, that can be £7,500 each a year. So they’re quite modest incomes. But between those incomes they can pay their 35%, that’s enough to allow them to live in that 2 bed flat. So it’s within reach of people on fairly modest incomes. But you’re right, it doesn’t service those on benefits because at the moment you can’t accrue equity on housing benefit.
So you’re just purely going off income, because you might have one couple who earn £25,000 a year and that’s all they have, and you might have another with £200,000 worth of savings. Does that get taken into account or is it purely taken off income?
Actually we use both savings and income to define wealth. That’s a good point, and we do use both. So the amount of equity we allocate to a particular household is calibrated according to their income and savings. We can therefore allocate you down to 90% of the value of your home or up to 110% according to your income and savings profile. As we get more equity involved in the scheme we might widen that to let in people on lower incomes and higher incomes.
The point of doing that is that there’s an element of cross subsidy. People on higher incomes are taking on more equity shares and therefore indirectly cross subsidising those people on lower incomes. So there’s an important cross subsidy going on there.
Presumably if somebody is made redundant or something, rather than the current model where within a few months they’re kicked out, there’s some flexibility designed into this?
We’ve got this thing called the Lilac Equity Fund, and this thing called the High Earners Policy. This top slices money from moderately high earners whose incomes are more than what’s needed for the debt associated with their house. Now that goes into this Lilac Equity Fund which is a little war chest which Lilac owns. This is to deal with short term balance of payment and difficulties amongst households. If one household got into difficulties, it could be used for that.
We’ve got three or four different options we support members with, because we are a member-led entity that’s meant to support its members. So we’ve got three or four things we can do before we need to terminate someone’s contract. Now that’s wonderful given that housing associations will go straight to termination of contract, whereas here there are lots of intermediate steps. So the security of tenure which is afforded in housing co-ops, especially this MHOS model is really good, and it’s something that all our members have really vocalised. They’re prepared to pay 35% of their net income to give them that extra surety, because it’s worth more money at the end of the day, the wellbeing effects you get from that security.
As someone living there yourself with a young family, and 35% of your income going, and obviously there’s the numerous benefits of living in that way but financially does it work out as a better deal for you than going into the housing market?
It certainly does, given I haven’t had a mortgage up to now, so haven’t gained any equity in the housing market in my life. What it also does, is because 35% is the upper limit of affordability so we wouldn’t want to go beyond that, and many people might be paying less than 35%, they might have paid mortgages off or might be living in very cheap rental accommodation.
We appreciate it’s not the most affordable situation. I suppose what people make a decision on is everything else they’re getting for that. The shared common house, the shared spaces, there’s allotments on site, there’s a pocket park. What you’re also getting in the homes, because we’re towards Passivhaus code 4 – I’ll give you an example. Our house, a 4 bed house, we’ve lived here for a year and our annual gas bill was about £200, and electricity was £400. So we had combined gas and electricity of £400. For a 4 bed, that’s fantastic, given the average might be £1000 plus. So what you have to factor in is the whole life cycle, whole house living costs, and once you do that it becomes very affordable.
Is the developer-led private housing model completely broken or can it be reformed do you think, and how might we do that?
Well there’s a few things we’d have to work on. One is land banking. I think land banking really needs some national legislation to prohibit it. I think there’s a whole tier of middle size regional house builders who are really prepared to take this stuff on. Especially, they’re more responsive to community client groups. What you’ve got with co-housing and community led housing and community land trusts is a really particular client base.
If you’re a community client, you’re a bunch of residents procuring and custom building your housing. That puts you in a really specific position as a client buying your house. They will not know how to deal with you, won’t understand your needs, and won’t understand how your internal structures work. They’re used to dealing with highly individualised, professionalised project managers from housing associations working to template and delivering at best cost values, whereas the agenda is completely different for community led housing.
There’s some simple stuff that all builders could do to understand the specific needs of community led housing clients – what we’re actually after as a product. If you’re procuring your house as a resident, it’s very different to procuring it on behalf of an agency.
What happens to a society without sufficient affordable housing? What impacts does that have on that society?
There’s a number of knock on effects. You get a dysfunctional labour market because people can’t live and work where they want to. As a geographer I’m interested in this kind of stuff. You get people whose travel to work patterns are really messed up. You get overheating in central cities and core cities and London in particular, where people are having to travel 20 miles and more because they can’t afford to live anywhere near where they work.
You get distorted travel to work patterns. Therefore you get more mobility, you get more carbon from travel, you get greater stress and anxiety based on people spending longer in their cars, people spending less time with their families because they’re travelling more, people more stressed at work, people working longer hours. The list goes on.
So really this is about a relocalisation agenda. About how do we not just create a functional housing market but how do we create functional communities with all the different skills bases and local assets and communities, energy infrastructure. Housing’s just one part of it, right? So this is just one part of the bigger picture. This is a story of community ownership which needs to be not just part of a housing story but part of a work culture and energy culture as well.
You’ve just written a book about capturing the experience of Lilac from start to finish. Hopefully the book answers the question, but how replicable is what you’ve done there?
In the book I try to lay out some lessons for different sectors like the development industry and community groups and professionals. It’s replicable if we can, in the next 10 years, lay down key bits of the infrastructure which will allow this unmet demand to flourish. There’s a huge amount of demand out there, people wanting to do this for themselves, as we’ve all been highlighting over the last few years and decades.
Putting the right sort of infrastructure in place will allow this to flourish. Aspects of that infrastructure include grants from central government which we’re seeing elements of. Land availability and land gifting, or peppercorn rents from local authorities or those who have land to the community land trust and community housing sectors. We need capacity building, so when groups get into this stuff they can handle moderately complex finance and especially community governance, so they know how to manage their own relationships. And we need the developers and architects to find a common language with community groups.
In the long term, I’d really like to see some Scandinavian model development industry emerge in the UK. What we really lack is a community owned development sector. We see this in Sweden, in Germany, in Denmark whereby you’ve got developers that are community owned. So the profits from one development are seeded to the next. Now imagine we had that in the UK. This kind of firm could not only understand intuitively community needs because they are from the community, but they start to recycle the profits and working on bulk discounts and sales and really being able to meet demand. This is a multi-billion pound market in the UK and I think it’s right for us to get together and service it. We’re such a small part of the story now, we could be a moderate part of the story.
Any last thoughts for people who might be sitting there in their Transition group thinking – yeah, we could do that?
The last thought is you can do it. There’s a little bit of a perseverance test. The journey is a little bit long. All this kind of stuff we’re doing, the book and the learning that we’ve got at Lilac, is trying to shorten that development journey. It took us 6 years. I think reasonably it should take 2 or 3. If we get all these pieces of the jigsaw in place people could really start to realise those desires in those timescales as people get organised and start to do this across the country.
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2 Oct 2014
You’re passing a field and you see a large hoarding bearing the words ‘New Homes Coming Soon’. What feelings do those words inspire? Delight to see ‘economic activity’ underway? Thrilled that ‘place-making’ is happening? Or a sense of despair, impotence and violation? As more and more such signs pop up around us, we’re giving space this month to exploring this in more depth. Think less NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”), and more SWIMBY (“Something Wonderful In My Back Yard”). The two are very different. We can do a lot better.
In Greek mythology, King Minos of Crete makes a deal with the King of Athens. He tells him, “I won’t send my navy to attack you if every year, you send me 7 boys and 7 girls to be eaten by the Minotaur in a maze complex beneath my palace”. Eventually the deal unravels when the King of Athens sends his son, Theseus, who manages, with the aid of a ball of string, to slay the Minotaur.
As the much of world enters a construction frenzy to build its way out of an economic collapse, and ‘New Homes Coming Soon’ signs spring up everywhere, I am reminded of the tale of the Minotaur. Communities in towns, cities and villages across the country are now expected to sacrifice green fields, cherished places, open spaces, in order to feed the insatiable development monster.
Of course we need homes, employment space and facilities, but is the current approach, what John Thackara (who we’ll be talking to later this month) calls ‘The Real Estate Industrial Complex’, really the only one? In his latest newsletter he asks: “is it beyond our creativity to provide our fellow human beings with shelter and sustenance without covering more of the world in concrete?”
At the heart of the current explosion is one core crazy idea: that the best way to repair the damage done by an economic crisis caused by an unsustainable housing bubble is to create an unsustainable housing bubble. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
In England and Wales it feels particularly insane. Clues as to what was to come were there to be read with the publication of the National Planning Policy Framework in 2012. At its heart is a “presumption in favour of sustainable development”, which should be seen as a “golden thread” running through both plan-making and decision taking. All development is now “sustainable development”, and is therefore a good thing.
We are in a new world, where nothing is the same, as Oliver Wainwright so articulately set out in a recent article called The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities. Local authorities, the very ones whose duty it is to decide on planning applications, now receive a New Homes Bonus, (whereby the government matches the Council Tax income from each property for 6 years) for every new home built in their area, at the same time as their own funding is being slashed, and planning departments are increasingly understaffed and under-resourced.
That’s not a bonus for every Passivhaus built, or green field left undeveloped, or empty building brought back into use. It’s not a bonus for every person on the housing list taken off the list, for every unused office building converted in apartments. It’s for every new home, regardless of where, how, or by whom it is built. It’s a toxic incentive, one that has led to a green light for developers up and down the country.
Already England and Wales are seeing shortages of some construction materials, and skilled construction workers in such short supply that we are already seeing wage inflation pushing up costs. In Cornwall, one of the places experiencing what CPRE Cornwall have called “an invasion”, 47,500 homes are proposed to be built over the next 16 years, mostly unaffordable to local people. In Cornwall the average house price is now 13 times the average annual wage.
The approach seems increasingly to be that Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSIs) are protected, but outside of those areas, it’s open season. Green belt? What’s that? New roads, flyovers, new housing developments in places with no infrastructure to support them, with no thought given to the transport implications? “Bring it on” seems to be the mantra.
In my town of Totnes things are getting ridiculous. It feels like a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere around the country. It’s a developer feeding frenzy. It is a town of 4,000 households. Another 400 are already granted approval, which will increase by 10% a town that can barely cope with the traffic and whose schools and other infrastructure are groaning at the seams. Yet still the Minotaur is not satisfied.
In addition to the 400, we have the apparently schizophrenic Dartington Hall Trust (DHT), whose commitments to “play our part in building creative and resilient communities which can be a force for positive social change” and “to use our land and buildings to drive positive social change” are conveniently forgotten when it sells land not on its ‘core estate’, which happens to be the only place any land is made available for housing.
It hired WYG, a company who prides itself on “making challenging concepts possible”, and whose portfolio includes advising Russian coal companies on how to extract coal in Siberia as the ice retreats, to argue its case to the local planning authority. When challenged on this at a public meeting, DHT defended this decision by saying WYG “had a local office” and that they were “an appointable consultancy”. Hardly what you would imagine for a charity whose core values are supposedly those of resilience, social justice and sustainability. The discrepancy between its values and its actions is vast.
Already local developer Cavanna Homes are building a housing estate called ‘Origins’ on a field it bought from DHT that no-one locally wanted developed, built to the very unambitious Code 3 and with just 17.5% affordable housing, haggled down from the original 60% promised due to “viability”. DHT, supported by WYG, have put 14 sites forward for consideration for development, which, if developed, would add 400-500 homes to a small parish. It appears, as I post this blog, that a very active community campaign has forced the Trust to reconsider this, and to, temporarily at least, withdraw these sites from consideration, opening the potential for a rethink, hopefully along the lines set out in this blog.
We’ve a development of over 100 additional homes on prime farm land on the edge of Totnes which was forced through in spite of vigorous local opposition and a road infrastructure unable to support it, and which has been somewhat patronisingly branded by the developer as “Camomile Lawns” (‘Camomile Lawns’ and ‘Origins’ sound more like brands of perfume than uninspired housing developments).
We’ve the Duke of Somerset, whose pension fund coffers are already significantly swelled through selling the land for ‘Camomile Lawns”, submitting an application to build 63 homes on the last working dairy farm in Totnes, which has sparked the creative and well-supported Friends of Great Court Farm‘s ‘The Duke’s a Hazard’ campaign. He met campaigners last week who asked him to withdraw the application, but the next day issued a statement saying:
“A number of issues were discussed and the Friends did ask whether the estate would consider withdrawing the application and engage with the Totnes Neighbourhood Plan. A decision has been made to continue with the application to develop this area of land … for much needed new housing”.
And it feels horrible and wretched. The process that leads to such developments is disempowering, patronising, and belittling. The Duke of Somerset’s ‘consultation’ on his planning application was an insult to the intelligence of those attending, and the feedback received (almost entirely negative if those attending that I spoke to are anything to go by) was never made public. The consultation on ‘Origins’ never gave the option as to whether such a valued green field site should be built on. Rather like saying “would you like me to paint your living room luminous orange or dark purple?” The option of “leave my living room alone and get out of my house” is never an option.
Doing anything about it is exhausting. We all have busy lives. We think maybe we’re the only ones who have a problem with it. We have no resources to oppose developers with large PR budgets and comms professionals. It’s time we’d rather spend with family, loved ones, or out walking. But people are increasingly mobilising and trying to do something about it.
To return to the Duke of Somerset’s “much needed new housing”. Much needed for who? Let’s take a step back and get a sense of the context here. The houses we build today will stand for at least the next 60 years. A recent report by PwC, its Low Carbon Economy Index, found that, according to Katie Valentine at ClimateProgress:
“… if countries want to get on track in lowering their emissions toward a 2°C goal, the world needs to cut its carbon intensity by 6.2 percent each year from now until 2100 — more than five times the current rate for the global economy. That rate would also be “double the decarbonisation rate achieved in the UK during the rapid shift to gas-fired electricity generation in the nineties,” the report notes”.
The International Energy Agency have warned that if we don’t get our emissions under control by just 2017, we will “lock-in” our economy to dangerous and irreversible global warming:
“The energy-related infrastructure then in place will generate all the CO2 emissions allowed … leaving no room for additional power plants, factories and other infrastructure unless they are zero-carbon, which would be extremely costly”.
We have a generation of people under 40 who, unless well-off parents are able to give them a deposit, have little chance of getting on the housing ladder at all. The homes we build use materials and techniques that are no longer appropriate. Cement, for example, is responsible for around 9% of global carbon emissions. Time to leave it behind.
Which brings us to the distinction between a NIMBY and a SWIMBY. Anyone opposing any of the above developments will inevitably be labelled a NIMBY, in much the same way that anyone who suggests that local economies matter and need some protection is a “protectionist”. When I reported on Twitter about a Neighbourhood Planning meeting in Dartington called to discuss DHT’s plans, someone called @PlanningAlex called the process “too parochial and unpredictable”. Didn’t feel parochial to me. Felt bold, engaged and focused. Focused on the “something else” rather than just calling for no development.
Although SWIMBY doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as NIMBY, it is far more useful. It’s a constructive approach, driven not by the wish to prevent change, to pickle things in aspic, but by a vision that it could be done in a different way, one that meets long term objectives rather than short-term ones, one that could revive rather than undermine communities, and could be built on, rather than steam-rollered over, local wishes. It could be wonderful.
It is in this context that last week we announced that the Atmos Totnes initiative will finally be going ahead. Atmos is a project driven forward by Totnes Community Development Society, formed from the coming together of Totnes Development Trust and Transition Town Totnes. The development is focused on the 8 acre former Dairy Crest milk-processing site adjoining the town’s station, which closed in 2007 with the loss of 160 jobs.
Atmos will be the first Community Right to Build Order (CRtBO). A CRtBO is a power given to communities in the 2012 Localism Act for England & Wales. The Localism Act is a deeply flawed double-edged sword. On the one hand offers powers like CRtBOs and Neighbourhood Plans, on the other it gives ever more power to hungry developers. In essence, a CRtBO states that if a community is able to show that it has community support, has done good consultation and engagement, and produced a masterplan, then if that masterplan is approved by over 50% of those who vote, that’s planning permission. It has yet to be tested anywhere. Atmos will be the first.
It’s a sea change, a vitally-needed and radical initiative, which shows a different way in which things could be done. It’s the embodiment of the SWIMBY approach. It’s what the project will make possible that is as, if not more, important than the development itself. It changes the context.
When a community owns its own assets, it can finally generate the funds needed to start turning the local economy round. It can buy options on land and decide whether to develop it or not. It can invest in much-needed new local businesses. It can start putting renewable energy in place. It can start to compete more evenly with the leech-like mass housing developers putting their community under siege. It really matters.
Atmos is wonderful, but there are still very few such projects. It took seven years to get that far. And the scale of what’s needed is vast. So, in that context, of the need for many more projects showing the power of communities not giving up and deciding they want a different story for how development happens, I would like today to suggest “A SWIMBY Manifesto”. We hope this inspires other communities around the world to argue for these too. It goes like this:
“We are urging a rethink. We recognise the need to house those in need and future generations. But the current approach is socially unjust, is increasing the debt burden on a generation already saddled with huge tuition fees, is increasing, rather than reducing, the carbon impact of the future, is extracting money from our local economies rather than keeping it there, for empowering and engaging communities rather than steamrollering over their opinions. It’s a huge missed opportunity as we could, if we truly engaged local communities, create something wonderful. We therefore call for:
- Genuine community-led planning: in most cases, “community engagement” is a tokenistic exercise along the lines of “here are our plans – what do you think?” Two of the potentially good things to emerge from the Localism Act are Neighbourhood Plans and Community Right to Build Orders. We call today for a moratorium on any new planning applications, or any designation of land for planning, until a Neighbourhood Plan has been approved for an area. We also call for any developments of more than 10 homes to use the Community Right to Build Order route to planning. This should become the norm for all development, and mean that development is meaningfully shaped by communities.
- Inspire people with possibilities: A Neighbourhood Plan can be used as a powerful tool to reimagine the economy of a community, or as a rather insipid thing that focuses on parking and houses without challenging any assumptions. Before embarking on the process, I think groups need to sit down, as it were, to a “Feast of Possibilities”, an inspiring immersion of what’s possible, so they are in a position to really maximise the possibilities of the process
- Retrofit first: although it seems to have escaped developers’ notice, we already have a lot of houses. However, taking Totnes as an example (because I have the data in front of me), 22% of homes fail the Decent Homes Standard due to “poor thermal comfort”, twice the national average, with 11% considered a “Category 1 Hazard” due to excessive cold. Around 14% of households face fuel poverty. The Totnes & District Local Economic Blueprint how retrofitting activity could be worth between £26m (basic) and £75m (full) in total. This relates to around 70 to 700 jobs respectively across the whole supply chain. Aiming to unlock 10% of the basic spend within the next year adds up to £2.6m to our local economy. Change the business model and do that.
- Empty buildings second: there are lots of empty buildings that could be repurposed. Walking around Bristol city centre, filled with office blocks shaped by architects egos and investors capital, it’s shocking to see how many of them are empty. Initiatives like Dot Dot Dot Property are one response, placing ‘property guardians’ in vacant properties to look after them and stop the blight caused by boarded up houses in exchange for 16 hours a month volunteering on local community projects. The story of Focus E15, the 29 single mothers in Stratford who took over boarded-up Council homes close to the Olympic Village is a great example of people deciding to just get on with this.
- Brownfield third: we support CPRE’s #wasteofspace campaign which is inviting people across England to nominate a brownfield site in their local area. Brownfield sites should be given preference over greenfield sites. The government has called for 200,000 new homes on redeveloped brown sites, but this is well short of what’s possible, estimated by CPRE to be nearer 1.5 million. Owners of brownfield sites should be compelled to make them available to community development organisations such as TCDS, rather than landbanking them for many years while the communities live with the blighted sites. Government and Peer-to-Peer support should be available for community groups. Had this been in place, Atmos Totnes would already be built by now.
- Support to level the playing field: community groups need support to be able to take on land options and create feasibility studies. It’s all very well to give communities new rights such as CRtBOs, but they need support in order to be able to run with them. It’s no surprise that Atmos will be the first. It emerged from an especially determined community and a team of people with great patience and a particular set of skills. Funds need to be made available to support communities in taking on options. Interest repayment rates should be lower the lower carbon the development strives to be, thereby reversing the “viability” incentives that usually lead to such measures being dropped as the development proceeds.
- Zero carbon homes should be the norm: at present, developers are driving down the sustainability and energy efficiency of what they build, arguing it isn’t “viable”. As far as future generations are concerned, anything other than homes that lock up carbon in their construction and emit as little as possible during their lifetime are “unviable”. Code 6 should be the norm, and the potential of local materials to enable a far greater contribution to local economies should be recognised. These, after all, will be the homes that will need to be consistent with the low carbon economy we so urgently need to be building, rather than actively working against that.
- Spreading the gain: there needs to be a review of Government initiatives like the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and New Homes Bonus. These generate money for areas where there is high growth but do nothing to stimulate growth in under-performing areas where development land is available, but not viable. Why not collect a percentage of these monies collected in high growth areas and spread it across those areas where there is no growth but available land and communities who wish to use such land for development but cannot get a foothold.
This month we will hear from Transition and other community groups who are trying to change what’s being proposed in their area. We’ll visit the social enterprise that has turned vacant office space into an urban mushroom farm, and to the co-housing project in Leeds who have pioneered a different development model and used strawbales too! We’ll explore the ingredients of a housing bubble, and how Transition initiatives can make best use of Neighbourhood Planning as a tool. We’ll speak to the architects who have pioneered the weaving of urban agriculture into new developments.
We’ll explore this from as many different angles as possible, in the hope that it inspires you to become a well-resourced and well-networked SWIMBY. Like any out-of-control compulsive eating disorder, like that suffered by the Minotaur, at its root is a deep sense of unhappiness and loneliness, a gap to be filled by gorging on, in his case, young Athenians. The development sector is similarly rooted in unhappiness and unhealthiness, perhaps more than any other industry it embodies the sense that there is no such thing as enough. Our need for housing has, given the maze, or rather the maze of legislation, financial incentives, political disempowerment, corruption that currently surrounded it, become a monster. If we can free our need for housing from that maze, it will be all of our benefit. We have everything to gain from looking at it afresh.
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29 Sep 2014
This month we have been exploring the theme of “Making Space for Nature” from a wide range of different angles. We started with an editorial piece which argued that one of the key things that nature can bring our work doing Transition is a sense of wonder. Something to do with glowworms apparently. We grabbed George Monbiot before he went on stage and talked about his book Feral and the concept of rewilding.
Writer and founder of the charity Write to Freedom, Caspar Walsh, talked about the vital role nature can play in the healing of young men. “She, it, whatever it is”, he told us, “works on them and softens them up so I don’t have to do all the work”. Ecopsychologist Mary-Jayne Rust talked about the impacts being separated from nature can have on us, and the benefits we get from making space for it. “When was the last time you heard of an activist going on a pilgrimage for eight months?” she asked.
Isabel Carlisle introduced us to Community Charters, and the potential they have for making space for nature at the community scale. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, and of the theory of Nature Deficit Disorder, talked to us via Skype. “If we’re not careful”, he told us, “environmentalists and others who care about the future of nature will carry nature in their briefcases, not in their hearts”. Mike Jones, who builds natural play spaces for kids, talked about the need to make space for “the primodial nature of kids”.
Aniol Esteban of New Economics Foundation reflected on why we need to make space for nature in economics. He told us:
Nature contributes to our mental health. It delivers mental health benefits and physical health benefits. It delivers a wide range of societal benefits. It contributes to our education. It can help reduce levels of crime. It can help urban regeneration. There is a huge range of areas and ways in which nature contributes to our wellbeing – individual wellbeing and collective wellbeing.
Hayley Spann, one of the participants in One Year in Transition, reflected on “what nature taught me”. We had a review of the first mainstream novel about Transition, The Second Life of Sally Mottram by David Nobbs (see right). We also talked to the author about where the idea came from, and what makes a good story. We had a recipe for “Transition Plum and Almond Cake”. Mark Watson reflected on the importance of ‘Making Space for Flowers’, and the many ways in which his Transition initiatives, Sustainable Bungay, create opportunities for people to encounter and benefit from nature.
Rob Hopkins reflected on how different our approach to managing water and drought would be if we took forests as the model on which we based it. He also responded to a critique of Transition by Ted Trainer and explored why the language we use to talk about this stuff really matters. He also went on the Peoples’ Climate March in London and reflected on how that was.
We heard from Transition initiatives about their experience of making space for nature in what they do. Hilary Jennings of Transition Town Tooting talked about the Tooting Foodival. Chris Bird wrote about the Transition Homes initiative in Totnes. Cara Naden discussed the many ways in which Transition Langport make space for nature. “I believe we all have an inherent bond with nature”, she wrote. “It makes us feel happy and healthy and makes us feel we are doing something positive and worthwhile for the benefit of wildlife, each other and ourselves”.
A very rich and thought-provoking month we hope you’ll agree. Our theme for October will be Transition and development. We hope you enjoy that too.
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