£100million for Empty Property in Co-alition Housing Settlement

“Amid all the gloom and doom surrounding funding for social housing, following the Comprehensive Spending Review, it’s encouraging to see £100 million has been earmarked to bring empty properties back into use” said Jon Fitzmaurice ” It’s not yet clear as to how this is going to be spent, but there’s every indication that there will be money available for Temporary Social Housing Grant. It’s an excellent source of funding for self-help housing organisations wanting to renovate empty publicly and privately owned properties  and once the position is clarified we will pass on this information to the network”. To read the Government’s Housing Settlement document click here.

Community Campus feaured in New Start

Middlesborough-based self help housing organisation, Community Campus ’87, are the subject of a feature in the latest edition of leading regeneration magazine, New Start. The organisation was set up in 1987 in response to the housing crisis facing people aged 16 to 24 in northeast England and has since provided housing for more than 5,000 people. In the feature, New Start‘s Jill Theobald talks to Community Campus co-founders, Carl Ditchburn and Simon Virth, about over 20 years of successful work and the looming challenges from cuts in public spending. The New Start e-zine also featured a case study of a Community Campus volunteer.

Outline project proposal

It’s always difficult making a pitch to owners to borrow and make use of their properties or approaching funders for money. For this reason the latest addition to the “How It’s Done” section is an outline project proposal into which you can insert your own text and create a proposal for your project. Click here to download the document as a word doc.

New Case Study – B4Box – Greater Manchester

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The latest in our series of Case Studies of self help housing projects from around the country. B4box delivers quality building services to local authorities and other property owners in Greater Manchester and at the same time guarantees to employ and train a high volume of local people. Click here to read more.

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.

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 community based organisations of one sort or another, who are perhaps unable to access mainstream housing for their members or clients, or who want to tackle local problems arising from empty property, 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 our pdf leaflet about self-help housing and feel free to circulate it to anyone who might be interested.

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