Flagship community led housing projects will deliver 100% genuinely affordable homes in London as part of the Mayor’s pledge to boost small builders in the capital and increase supply.
It has been announced that the Mayor’s small sites, small builders programme will be extended with £3.8 million of funds over the next year as the London Community Land Trust will deliver the community programmes on two chosen sites.
The Trust, the UK’s first urban community land trust, was formed as a result of campaigning by community organising group Citizens UK, is confirmed as the successful bidder for building on sites at Cable Street in Tower Hamlets and Christchurch Road in Lambeth.
The projects will deliver around 70 affordable new homes which will be priced according to average local incomes and based on the principle that residents shouldn’t have to pay more than one third of their income on their mortgage, meaning that they will typically be sold at between a third and half of market value.
London’s home building sector is dominated by a small number of large developers that build the vast majority of homes across the capital. The number of small builders, those that deliver fewer than 100 homes, has halved over the last 10 years, and Mayor Sadiq Khan wants to make small plots of publicly owned land more accessible to London’s small and medium sized builders, including community led housing groups, through a simple bidding process with standardised legal contracts.
Ten small Transport for London located across seven different boroughs were launched in February as part of the pilot, many of which are left over land. The number of homes proposed at each site range from two to 90.
There was significant interest in the pilot, with 134 bids received from 80 organisations ranging from developers and community led housing organisations to registered providers and architect-developers.
‘Tackling the housing crisis is complex and will take time, and we must use every tool at our disposal. Making small plots of public land available for housing development is a key part of addressing London’s housing shortage,’ said Khan.
‘Not only will this programme help to provide the new, genuinely affordable homes that Londoners so desperately need, but it will also reinvigorate our small and medium-sized homebuilders after years of over reliance on large developers,’ he added.
Community Land Trusts are a way for Londoners to play a part in delivering the genuinely and permanently affordable homes that the city desperately needs, according to Calum Green, co-director of the London Community Land Trust.
‘These two sites, announced by the Mayor will mean over 200 people will no longer be forced to leave London and can stay in the neighbourhood they call home,’ he added.
