Anke When we think of housing, we think of people owning their houses or renting or kind of social slash council housing, but that there is an alternative which is community-led, which is organized through communities of people living together. That was really surprising to me. Maria This is People Over Power, a podcast sowing seeds of solidarity. I'm Maria McCoy, and in this episode, trusting in genuinely affordable housing, we discover how communities can lower housing costs and why you should join one of the 500 community land trusts across England and Wales. Let's start with the situation we're in. There's nowhere near enough quality affordable housing in the U.K. In England alone, there are 8.5 million people without housing that meets their needs. Young people don't have the same opportunities as their parents, as the cost of housing rises much faster than incomes. In 1997, it would cost someone three and a half years worth of income to buy a house. Now, that figure has increased to nine years. The impossibility of buying a home keeps people in the rental market, where things are also pretty grim. Private renters spend 23 percent of their income on rent, but this number varies widely by location, race, gender, and age. People under the age of 25 spend 37 percent of their income on rent. No affordable options puts people at the whim of private landlords, who face little pressure to uphold basic standards. In 2020, one out of five privately rented homes failed to meet the decent homes standard. Social housing is meant to provide an alternative, but also comes up short. Over a million households are stuck on council waiting lists. These lists are especially long for family sized homes. We have a right to decent housing, so what can we do about it? I reached out to someone who could help. Anke My name is Anke Schwittay. I'm a director of the Brighton Hove Community Land Trust. Maria Beyond her service on the board of the Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust, Anke is a professor in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. Anke I first became involved with the Land Trust through my academic research on student housing co-ops, and that was probably around 2020. And then I joined the board two years ago. So that would have been in 2023. For me, it's really interesting how my work with the land trust intersects with my academic research, but also with the teaching I do at Sussex. You know, I teach a module on activism for development and social justice, and we focused on student housing this year. Collaborative housing, co-operative housing, community-led housing is marginal in the U.K., but it's much more prominent in other countries. For example in mainland Europe, surprisingly so even in the U.S. So there's international models we could learn a lot from in this country to really support community-led housing to become a much better known and better supported alternative towards, you know, affordable housing. Maria The Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust describes community led housing as, quote, a way that people and communities can come together to solve their own housing issues and provide high quality and affordable homes, end quote. This includes housing co-operatives, co-housing, and self builds. Anke So a community land trust is a nonprofit, community-led organization that aims to support the building of affordable housing and other kind of non-commodified community spaces through basically taking land out of the financialized land system. And just really quickly, the general history of community land trusts is quite interesting because they originated with the civil rights movement in the United States in the 60s, allowing African-American sharecroppers access to land. So there's a very kind of social justice element to the broader history of the land trust. Community land trusts are registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as community benefit societies, and they have kind of membership of the community through the directors that are being elected to the board of directors by members. So, for the Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust, anybody can join the land trust by basically paying a pound or buying a share for a pound, become a member and then can come to the AGM, can become a director and can vote for the directors. So there is a lot of, kind of, it's a real kind of grassroots organization. Maria How do community land trusts keep homes affordable? Anke So the idea is to purchase land or kind of buildings and land, and to take this out of the speculative housing market. One of the issues why housing is so unaffordable, is because it's basically become an object of speculation, where it's become financialized. And a lot of actors and financial institutions involved in housing are not, you know, are not involved in the sense of securing housing as a right, but as a means of extracting rent and ultimately generating a profit. And the community land trust's objectives are very different. It is a non-for-profit organization, and its explicit aim is to keep housing affordable. So any housing that is being built on community land trust land, for example, or housing that is purchased, the value of that housing is not kind of speculatively increased. It's staying as affordable as possible. But the idea is to never turn housing into a source of profit, but to keep it affordable for the people who live there. So basically really generate or emphasize the use value of housing over the exchange value of housing in kind of more academic terms. Maria How is the community prioritized in your planning or decision making? Anke So as I said, it's really easy and affordable to become a member of the land trust. And the other way that community involvement happens is through the focus of the projects, which are always very much focused on creating benefit for the community, either through housing or through research projects, or the case that I know best of supporting a student housing co-operative. Maria Anke supports the student co-op as both a researcher and a board member of the Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust. Anke The collaboration between the Land Trust and SEASALT, which stands for Southeast Students Autonomously Living Together, and it's the local student housing cooperative. That collaboration began again in 2018, and eventually resulted in the successful purchase of a seven bedroom house in Moulsecoomb. So the house, it was bought by the land trust. There was a joint community share offer, where both organizations together raised over 300,000 pounds for the down payment. And then the house is on a long term lease to SEASALT, which is again a registered organization. So it's been going for four years now, and the students are entirely running the house, managing the house, governing the house, finding new tenants. And the land trust is really working with the students to support their abilities to run the co-op, to run SEASALT. And one of the biggest challenges is knowledge transfer, because, you know, it being a student housing co-op, there’s a really high turnover of residents and generating knowledge and passing on the necessary knowledge from one cohort to the other is a challenge of all student housing co-ops. And that's kind of the focus of the collaboration between this, between SEASALT and the land trust at the moment. Maria Another community research project that came up in our conversation was one called Who Owns Brighton? Through a series of workshops, community members took a closer look at the development process for a particular build. Anke We've actually taken a pilot site called Circus Street in the center of Brighton and worked with community researchers to develop a methodology to really understand how this site has been developed and who's benefiting from it and who is losing out. And it's become really clear that, you know, these global financial organizations and structures are seeing housing as a very profitable area because, you know, we all need housing. It's one of those things that will always be around. And with their entry into the sector especially, I think that's really contributed to the current unaffordability of housing, not just in Brighton, but in many, many cities around the world. Maria We'll be back after this short break. Maria (distorted voice) The housing crisis is brought to you by private equity. Not only is private equity increasing their investment in the U.K. housing market, investing over $4 billion in the first quarter of 2024, they'll try anything to increase their returns. That's right! From rent maximizing algorithms to increasing evictions, they're moving wealth from renters here to investors overseas. Thanks to faceless landlords, rent has never been so expensive, and they're proud to offer a lifetime guarantee of renting dingy flats. Private equity: the housing market’s best kept secret! Maria So considering the benefits, why isn't everyone part of a housing co-op? Well, a few things are slowing their growth. Back to my conversation with Anke. Anke In the 2010’s, it was under the conservative government and there was a fund, a community led housing fund that supported the establishment of different organizations in different places around the country. And community land trusts became a really popular form of association to access some of this funding and then to organize projects in different cities. But that was the context in which the community, the land trust, was established. There was, as I said, there was some money around, so there were some paid administrators, and it was quite a few projects in the beginning. Unfortunately, as all of this funding dried up, the organization has become a little bit smaller and more focused, and it's now entirely volunteer run. But that is just to support the kind of running of these organizations, like community land trusts, applying for external funding from, you know, foundations or philanthropic grants or something, it's very competitive. So it's quite difficult. And the other issue I would say there is that Brighton is a really, really expensive housing market. And then the access to finance, housing finance, mortgages that would enable community led housing is also very difficult. It's been really made even more difficult when interest rates rose, you know, a couple of years ago. And that situation has really put a damper on any kind of initiatives of groups wanting to create new community led housing projects in the city. It's just basically financially become really, really hard. Although I have to say that the labor government has committed to now put more resources into this general area. So we will see when that comes online. Maria Yeah, definitely. Is there any other project that's coming up next for you with the Brighton and Hove Land Trust? Anke So in general, we are trying to broaden out the Who Owns Brighton research from the Circus Street pilot site to all of Brighton and Hove. And then I think another really emerging project is around kind of guardianships, which is a really interesting way to deal with empty properties. You know, there's a lot of city owned, council owned properties that are empty, for various reasons. And guardianships is a really kind of interesting model that's applied in other cities to maybe allow people to temporarily live in these properties until, you know, a buyer is found or until the council is developing them. And I've come across these guardianship models in my research in Switzerland, for example. So that's something that's currently in the works. Maria Finally, some homework. What can we do to support quality and affordable housing in our communities? Here's Anke's response. Anke I think getting involved with organizations that continuously, you know, put pressure on politicians like local councilors, national policymakers, about the importance of supporting truly affordable housing. So not not schemes that are not really affordable because even, you know, 80 percent of market rate, which I think is one of the definitions of affordable housing, is unaffordable to many, to many people in Brighton and other cities. So really getting involved with, you know, social movements that are fighting for affordable housing through policy changes, creating alternative funding models. There's tenant unions. So I think there's a number of ways in which people can get involved, including joining the land trust, because I think it is ultimately collective action and asking politicians, but then also fighting against the financialization of housing to ensure that the housing that is built is affordable to as many people as possible. In Brighton and other cities. Maria I'm Maria McCoy, and you've been listening to ‘Trusting in Genuinely Affordable Housing’ on People Over Power. This episode was produced through the School of Media, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Sussex. Music is by The Joy Drops. The logo and episode art are by me. In this episode, you heard from Anke Schwittay at the Brighton and Hove Community Land Trust. Learn more about their work at bhclt.org.uk. In the episode notes, you'll find links to take action for affordable housing. There are additional action items and resources on our website. Thanks for listening.