If there’s one thing I know about Community Land Trusts now it is that they are made up of people who have got off their backsides and done something. If you put aside your prejudices, that’s pretty much the model of the entrepreneur property developer, really.

Something very interesting is going to happen to the housing industry over the next five years and I’ve got a feeling that people who wouldn’t be seen dead together might make productive bedfellows in the new Big Society face of things.

My adventure started off at a community development meeting I went to in Chelmsford, where a group of people engaged in helping local people take action and find a voice, were sharing their hopes and fears, in the light of the new coalition government. That’s where I first found out what a Community Land Trust was. It is also where a local government worker said as we were discussing the cuts, ‘You’re private sector, you’ll be ok.’ Yesterday the adventure continued at the Community Land Trusts 2010 conference in Savoy Place, London, (as a guest of Newstart Magazine)where another group of people engaged in helping local people take action and find a voice were launching a new CLT Network, a national body to facilitate and enable their work, to be hosted by the National Housing Federation.

A Community Land Trust is a corporate body set up by local people, with the objective of acquiring and managing assets for the benefit of the community, in perpetuity. They hare been around in the US for years, and here too in organisations such as Almshouse Trusts. Using a shared equity model, it is theoretically possible for CLTs to provide affordable housing. Real schemes have been particularly successful in rural areas where local house prices can be as much as 20 time local income levels, thereby pricing local people out of the housing market.

The reasons CLTs are not having huge success all over the country developing affordable housing are threefold:

1. They can’t get people to give them land (especially Local Authorities, who through a mixture of regulation and attitudes can’t realise the benefit);
2. They can’t get planning permission, particularly in rural areas whre there is a huge need for affordable housing; and
3. They can’t get funding (and this is worse now for them as it is for most of us).

These three problems add up to a huge headache and years of wrangling with bureaucracy, with only the most tenacious (or lucky) getting projects built.

Things are changing however, and the conference yesterday was buzzing with talk of CLTs finally being able to overcome their difficulties and emerge into the mainstream, in the way that Housing Associations did over thirty years ago.

Getting Land

Headline speaker at the CLT conference yesterday was Grant Shapps, Housing Minister. Shapps is part of the team putting together the Decentralisation and Localism Bill which will be published at the end of the year. The bill is expected to make huge changes in the way Local Authorities operate, and Shapps hinted in his speech that he’d like to make it easier for land to be made available for community projects.

In the afternoon panel discussion, Kate Brathewaite (Carnegie Trust) and Stephen Hill (C20 Futureplanners) talked about Local Authorities having a need for CLTs to help fill a vacuum in housing provision, or the provision of other facilities and services. This might also assist in the availability of land.

Getting Planning Permission

The process of achieving planning consent for affordable housing (often through ‘exception sites’) is fraught with challenges for RSLs. When we do it, there has to be a careful step-by-step approach with all stakeholders on board.

Grant Shapps announced yesterday that the government will enable the establishment of Local Housing Trusts, and that these trusts, if they get 90% support from the local community will be able to ‘Grant themselves Planning Permission’. Blimey.

If that did happen in any meaningful, practicable way, then CLTs would have real power to deliver housing, if they could get funding.

Getting the Money

The only issue Grant Shapps wouldn’t make a commitment on was funding, and I read and heard a great deal yesterday about difficulties making the first step in access to funding. So who’s going to help with this final hurdle?

As anyone in the conference audience could tell you, whilst their motivations might be centred on community benefit, property developers and investors are motivated largely (but not exclusively) by money. In the last few years they have had to be particularly creative in how they make it.

In pursuit of profit during a recession, developers move from areas of low demand to areas of higher demand. Over the last few years we’ve seen them move from open market housing into residential care, for example. Not all developers are short of funding even now, and if they have it they are just finding more effective ways of using it.

So if Community Land Trusts, who will, all being well, have the planning and land opportunities, and developers, some of whom have the financing opportunities, can overlook the fact that they have different motives and understand how to meet them both, wouldn’t there be a chance to achieve more?

With legislative support for planning and land availability, do you think there is an opportunity for CLTs to have the sort of clout that they can talk to and work with housebuilders and developers about joint ventures, if they knew how to talk to them?

Could we even forsee (as Michael Kohn of Slider Studio suggested to me in the break) a situation where some CLTs negotiate their facilities and housing with RSLs and volume housebuilders on a larger scale?

I think Community Land Trusts should consider talking to the construction industry. With the right attitude, the new planning landscape might facilitate some mutually beneficial relationships.

When I was studying to be an architect in 1990s Liverpool our design tutors gave us a project. We were to choose a method of generating renewable energy by the Mersey, and then design a ‘theme park’ ride that would be powered by this energy.

Now it’s worth remembering that as a design project in an architecture school, this was a vehicle for learning, and did not include a cost element. Thinking about it, only one project I ever did in 7 years of academic study to be an architect involved the monetary cost of anything.

Well, I couldn’t get with the brief. I just didn’t accept that this was a reasonable thing to do, in a recession, in a northern city struggling with unemployment and social tension. There were people living in the same street as me who couldn’t afford to heat their houses. But mostly, I didn’t agree that one should create energy simply to waste it on a theme park. It felt so much like the Liverpool Garden Festival debacle all over again but with Greenwash. Why not save energy instead?

Apparently, saving energy was not sexy.

Later we discovered that the purpose of this project was to generate ideas for the tutors to use to enter a competition in a national architecture journal about renewable energy. I kid you not.

Anyway, what has that 19 year old story got to do with today’s debates on sustainable housing?

Points

In those days energy standards for homes were incredibly lax by today’s standards. These days it’s all about points, and points mean prizes.

The Code for Sustainable Homes which is the compulsory standard by which all housing must be measured in the UK. Level 3 of the Code is compulsory for Grant Funded Housing now and will be for all housing next year. The Code involves calculations designed to reduce the carbon emissions of the construction and operation of housing. It is based around the concept that carbon emissions are what are causing global warming, so by reducing the huge carbon footprint of new build housing we can reduce our CO2 emissions and thereby save the planet.

One of the ways in which you get points in your quest to reach higher levels of the code is to generate renewable energy on site. You can take it out of the sunshine, fish it out of the ground or catch it from the wind. You can even grow it and burn wood chip in boilers. The homes are better insulated too, but you get points for making ‘green energy’, and at higher levels it is almost mandatory.

These days, sustainable housing isn’t just about points though, its also about money.

Money

Unlike my university project, meeting the code for sustainable homes has to have a cost implication, and as architects our objective must be to deliver a project that meets all the needs of the client, including cost criteria.

In the short term, open housing market, and for those whom capital (construction) cost is the only issue, this means choosing a technology whose first and sometimes only objective is to meet the needs of the Code as cheaply as is possible.

But if you are a Housing Association or a Residential Property Investor, the homes you build also have a maintenance cost to consider, which may affect your choice of technology.

And as a property owner with a long term interest in your property, you may also want to provide homes which you or your tenants will find cheaper to heat. Energy costs money, even if you don’t have to dig coal out of the ground to get it. So why not save energy instead?

This is why Barefoot & Gilles developed the GreenGauge Homes approach to affordable housing, to look at the whole picture and take all the clients needs into account. If this means assessing what training tenants need to live in the houses (and choosing technology to minimize it), how easy they are to look after (and choosing approaches which made it easier), what their energy bills might be (and designing to help reduce bills), then so be it. The University of East Anglia are doing the monitoring and lessons learned about both tenant attitudes and real energy bills are moulding the progression of future projects. A bit of joined up thinking at the beginning will save so much heartache (and cost) which is going to face our Code rated homes in years to come.

What has come to mind for me, is that like my story about the theme park powered by renewable energy generation, the Code isn’t quite getting it. House builders don’t have to think about the future energy use of their Code 3 & 4 houses, indeed they are installing technology which makes ‘free’ energy and perpetuates the idea that the amount of energy one uses is not the issue.

Furthermore all this new and largely unfamiliar technology is making homes more complex, more prone to maintenance problems, more difficult for ordinary people to live in.

One thing which has stayed the same though. Making energy on site is still sexy, but that is really all it is. It might be sexy but it’s not clever.

This is where PassivHaus comes in.

Energy

PassivHaus is an approach developed in Germany. The basic premise is to reduce the energy use of a home to a minimum, firstly by ‘super insulating’, and then by reducing heat lost by air loss. The result is homes which use a tiny amount of energy, because all the energy in the bodies of the occupants, the equipment and lighting in the home, contributes towards heating it and is not lost through exhaust air or poor insulation.

Now I’m not saying that PassivHaus is the answer. The homes have to be airtight, something which normal British housing just is not. Airtightness is such an issue that it bears upon the construction process so much that there is debate about whether our industry has the capability to build these homes in volume. There are also voices raised about the wisdom of such an air controlled home, about stuffiness and practicality.

Perhaps the practical implementation of a PassivHaus type of approach would be just as challenging as the Code is turning out to be for the UK. Maybe we will have to find a reasonable compromise.

Nevertheless, the idea of a home built to save, conserve and reuse energy just seems to be a much more sensible starting point. Don’t you agree?

For my talk on GreenGauge Homes this week, I tried to find a visualisation of the compulsory introduction of the Code for Sustainable Homes, which came into use in 2007, and the Ecohomes rating which it superseded. When I couldn’t find one, I decided to make one myself.
Here it is:

Timeline for the Code for Sustainable Homes

Notes on the timeline:

The timeline shows the standard required for Grant Funded Affordable Housing in Green, and All (including Open Market or Developer) Housing in Blue. The red line is where we are now.
For example, Grant funded housing has had to meet Ecohomes Pass since 2003, and Code 3 since 2007. Developer Housing will need to meet Code 3 by 2010 and Code 4 by 2013.
This is for newbuild homes of course, in England and Wales. More details here at the Communities and Local Government Website.
Note the Ecohomes ratings have been superseded by the Code ratings, but they aren’t really comparable as they have different indicators. They are arranged in order of their compulsory introduction. The timeline has also been simplified, taking out optional items and only showing annual steps.

What does this mean for the industry?

The timeline covers 13 years – just 9 years for the Code alone, which is not really very long in the construction industry. To turn new UK housebuilding around in that time is a big deal. In particular, 2010 will be difficult – the open market will have to meet code 3, and there is a significant step between code 3 and code 4 for affordable housing to meet.
Housing associations have had a head start dealing with the Code, but Design and Build tenders coming in recently have shown that some contractors aren’t entirely sure how they are going to meet the requirements of Code 4. Like the planning system, things are getting more complicated. It’s important therefore, to get your Design Stage Assessment sorted early and then not muck about chopping and changing.

And for the Open Market?

Before the latest financial problems, open market housing developers were also starting to realise that some of their contractors might have a few problems building to the code.
There may a lot less housebuilding going on now, but when things pick up again the deadlines will still be there. Make the time now to understand what the code means for your business.
Meanwhile to up the pressure a little more, some planning authorities are already making a code rating a condition of some planning permissions.

And lastly , why not take a positive spin…

In practical terms, developers have to make money, so they have to avoid unnecessary expenditure. To be the most cost effective, a developer is going to want to meet the code as cost effectively as possible, and this means choosing renewable technologies purely on capital cost.

However it is also worth considering the commercial benefits of your choice of technology. If the renewables option you choose can be shown to further reduce utility bills, this may be a selling point for open market or shared ownership homes, or a useful extra benefit for your tenants.

Over to you

What is your experience of dealing with the Code?  Lets share our experiences and suggestions.