LET’S HACK HOUSING: According to Louise Crabtree-Hayes who will be a panellist at Let’s Hack Housing, there is a world of difference between two (sometimes confused) models of alternative non-market housing. The larger better-known structure is Community Housing Providers and the other that comes under the umbrella of a community land trust or CLT.
Crabtree-Hayes is a professor at Western Sydney University and one of Australia’s leading researchers in diverse models of community-led, environmentally sensitive, and permanently affordable housing.
She has no illusion: there is no magic bullet to providing land or housing cheaply.
But one thing she’s positive about is that CLTs provide consistently great results that can cascade down the generations. Key is that these housing models are deeply rooted in the community and long lived, not based on benefits that might vaporise (as the National Rental Affordability scheme did after its 10 year span).
Around the world there are shining examples of what can be achieved.
In the US the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont has 2500 properties across three counties, “but it’s also got gardens, a food shelf, childcare, aged care, a queer space, a refugee centre…and a bunch of shops.”
Another is in the Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative in Boston, Massachusetts.
In each example there are multiple benefits beyond housing.
“Someone will say, one of the reasons people can’t get into housing is because they don’t have appropriate employment opportunities. We need a youth development program. And so they’ll start doing that. Or you’ll get people saying, ‘We really need to be holding on to our green space’ and so the CLT will say, well, ‘we’ll take title of that park, and we’ll keep that as a park’.
“And so you see better place making outcomes at a more than individual project scale.”
You get all these “knock on effects,” Crabtree-Hayes says, thanks to people’s sense of worth because they have a choice.
“There’s intergenerational transformation in terms of people’s sense of what’s possible. And you do get that to an extent with stable housing, but not if it’s still being perceived as delivered by someone else, and you don’t have a line to that someone else, you don’t, you don’t know who they are. You’re not involved in it. It just doesn’t do those other things. And that’s where you start getting people, you know, trapped in that sense of, there’s nothing I can do.”
In Australia the regions are interested
In Australia there’s rising optimism for these models in the regions as local government councillors realise they need to strategically examine their landholdings for outcomes that benefit their entire community.
“We’re seeing it becoming a strategic partnership issue, which is what we’ve seen internationally as well in global cities that have said we’re just not cracking this affordability issue by assuming that somehow the market will do it, because it’s not in the market’s interest to do submarket housing.
“Cities like New York, London, Barcelona, a whole heap of European cities, are saying [they] actually need to be forming strategic, long term partnerships with community based organisations,” she says.
These organisations are looking for not just affordable housing in the way that the CHPs do, “but ones that are really place based, and that are coming from the community in terms of speaking directly to the diversity of local housing need. And that might mean partnering with an established CHP, but it’s not presuming that the CHP knows best.
Louise will take questions as one of the panellists at Let’s hack Housing next Thursday be on one of the panels at the “Let’s Hack Housing” Surround Sound event next Thursday 26 September. Buy your tickets here – TFE members $35