New Case Study - East Cleveland Youth Housing Trust

The latest in our series of Case Studies of self help housing projects from around the country. ECYH Trust is a charity that helps young people aged 16-25 years old, by providing high quality affordable housing and work experience in building skills. Click here to read more.

New section on Temporary Social Housing Grant

Temporary Social Housing Grant (TSHG) is available from the Homes & Communities Agency (HCA) and provides funding  for Registered Social Landlords (RSLs  - eg housing associations) to bring back into use properties, in public or private ownership, that would otherwise remain empty and unavailable for social housing. What makes TSHG so important is that it’s possible for RSLs to do this in partnership with local community based housing organisations (e.g. self help housing organisations). Our new page explaining TSHG is well worth a read if your organisation is looking for funding for self help housing activities.

Welcome to self-help-housing.org

Self-help-housing.org is the only website dedicated to promoting and supporting self-help housing initiatives.

It provides ordinary people, who are perhaps unable to access mainstream housing or who want to tackle local problems, with the tools to take on and make use of the increasing number of empty properties in our cities, towns and villages It’s the first time that this range of information has been brought together in one place where it can be accessed by anyone.

Many of today’s large housing associations and co-ops were started up forty or fifty years ago by local people with just a couple of properties and so it’s not really a new idea; just one that needs reviving.

Click here to download a pdf leaflet about the site.

The site provides everything you need to know:

• how to get organised
• how to get hold of and borrow empty properties from their owners
• where to go for funding
• how to organise any necessary repairs
• how to use volunteers &
• how to turn renovating properties into a training opportunity.
• plus a bank of specimen documents

It also provides many useful contacts to enable you to find out what other people have done and achieved:

• case studies highlighting different types of successful projects
• a directory of projects already involved in self help housing &
• links to other organisations and websites

“This excellent initiative helps groups of local people create new homes for themselves and their community from wasted property. Nothing could be more right for the times we live in.” David Ireland, CEO, Empty Homes Agency