What is a Community Land Trust (CLT)?
Decent, secure and affordable homes are getting harder and harder to come by in London. Increasing pressure on local authority provisions and ever-increasing house prices mean people are having to choose between living in terrible conditions or leaving their friends, family and community for good.
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are non-profit organisations that come in many different shapes and sizes but are all set up and run by local people to develop and manage homes as well as other assets important to that community.
London CLT in particular focuses on working with communities to create permanently affordable homes and transform neighbourhoods. It currently delivers genuinely and permanently affordable homes to buy at a price based on local incomes, offering up one model to address the growing gap in the housing market between people who qualify for a council property and people who can afford to buy their own home.
Community-led
London CLT has been organising to deliver genuinely and permanently affordable homes that are owned and run by local people since 2007. We moved our first 23 families into St. Clement’s, London’s first Community Land Trust (CLT), in 2017 and are now allocating homes on our second site of 11 genuinely and permanently affordable homes in Lewisham.
Since 2007, we have campaigned alongside local London Citizens groups for more CLT homes in neighbourhoods across London, including Sydenham, Shadwell, Lambeth, Southwark, Ilford, Croydon and Ealing.
Over the last twelve years, we have learnt how to take effective political action to deliver CLT homes. London CLT grew out of the community organising efforts of London Citizens, who have been building the capacity of people to participate in public life since the early 1990s.
We continue to work hand-in-hand with organisers, community leaders and member organisations of London Citizens. Our shared approach is rooted in traditions of broad-based organising (including building relationships and developing local leaders), which remains central to all our strategies.
How much do London CLT Homes cost?
London CLT homes are priced according to local earnings, ensuring that people are no longer priced out of the neighbourhood they grew up in.
‘Local earnings’ are taken as the median income, using data published by the Office for National Statistics in November each year. This means that our homes are often 50% or less of the comparable market rate for the area.
London CLT homes are about providing people with a home, not just an asset. The contract signed upon moving in makes sure that all residents have to sell the home to the next household again at a price according to local earnings. This means the homes can be sold on again at a similarly affordable level every time a new family moves in.
Who gets a home?
London CLT develops an allocation policy for each site in discussions with local members and the local authority.
At our first site at St Clements in Tower Hamlets, the allocations criteria were sourced through a survey of members, subsequent local workshops and discussions with the council.
This resulted in the following criteria:
1. Finance – priced out of the housing market but able to afford a London CLT home.
2. Housing Need – require a property more suitable than their current accommodation.
3. Connection – have a minimum of five years’ connection to the borough.
4. Involvement – belong to and participate in the local community
5. Be supportive of the London CLT.
Why Christchurch Road?
Young leaders from youth organisation The Advocacy Academy were at the forefront of the campaign, alongside leaders from local churches, schools, a synagogue and a mosque. Lambeth Citizens met with Councillor (Cllr) Matthew Bennett, the Cabinet Leader for Housing at the time and discussed with him how a community land trust in the area would help fulfil the urgent need for permanently and genuinely affordable housing in the borough. In March 2017, Citizens invited Cllr Bennett and the Leader of Lambeth Council, Lib Peck, to a Housing Assembly. After hearing testimonies about how the lack of decent housing was affecting people’s lives, Cllr Peck agreed to work with Citizens to find a community land trust site in Lambeth!
The group also took Lambeth councillors on a tour of the St Clements CLT, showing them how London Community Land Trust was already improving lives with well-built, affordable homes; and held an engagement morning in Brixton to explain CLTs to the public and canvass support.
The next step was to seek out a suitable site in the area. We held some local community walks, looking out for land which seemed to be available. One of the sites we found was a patch of scrubland on Brixton Hill, behind a fence and covered with litter and brambles, but looking promising. Some research revealed that it was owned by Transport for London (TfL). After the Second World War, it had been the site of prefab houses to accommodate people who’d lost their homes in the Blitz, but it had lain empty and unused for many years.
In November 2017, we participated in a Housing Assembly with Deputy Mayor for Housing James Murray, together with Citizens members from across the capital. Alongside demands about renting and levels of affordable housing on new developments, we asked him to support ‘a presumption in favour of community land trusts on all GLA and TfL owned small sites’ starting with three small TfL sites including Brixton Hill. James Murray said yes!
In early 2018, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced that the derelict site in Lambeth, on Brixton Hill, would be put out to tender for community-led housing. This could be an amazing opportunity to provide homes for over 80 people, as well as open up much-needed green space for the whole community. Lambeth Citizens has been working with London CLT to bid for a community land trust on the site, and discussing what sort of homes and buildings people would like to see built. On 22nd March 2018, Lambeth campaigners joined with campaigners from Shadwell Citizens to gather at City Hall and hand in our bid.
Then came the difficult task of choosing our architect! A small group of people from the steering group shortlisted four architects who we were confident could work with us to design the homes. We then held a Choose the Architect event in a church close to the site. Lambeth residents came and spoke to the architects, asked questions, and then voted for which firm to work with on these homes. The winner, by a clear margin, was RCKa.
We submitted an application for funding to the GLA in January 2021. In April 2021, as part of London Citizens, a member of our steering group negotiated on stage and asked the Mayor to commit to unblocking the £38m community housing fund, and to intervene where necessary; which he agreed to.
We also ran an action on the GLA and after several meetings, we were able to help unlock the funding and sign a funding agreement for the site.
As of January 2022, we are now working towards submitting a planning application in April, with help from the wider community!
BIOS
Razia:
I am the Co-chair of Christchurch Road Steering group. I joined the steering group upon its formation in October 2018. I learned of the steering group after seeing a leaflet in my building a few weeks prior and then someone came knocking on my door to talk about affordable housing. At the initial meeting I’d come to the realisation this was unlike any affordable housing scheme I had seen and heard of before; this was genuinely affordable housing.
I am mother to two children and have lived in Lambeth for over 16 years. This is the solution to the threat of having to leave what my family and I have known to be home and our community.
This was an idea born out of the brilliant young minds of members of our own community at the Advocacy Academy. I have been a part of this journey for just over 3 years of this 6-year-long campaign which is entirely community-led. Since being involved in this project I have I have been on a journey of self-rediscovery. It gave me the boost I needed to restart my career in accountancy.
In 2019 I joined the Board of London CLT as a community representative and in 2021 I became Vice-Chair. London CLT is innovative in the way it seeks to bring affordable housing to communities. It is the vehicle which allows us as a community to do what is needed to best serve our community’s housing needs.
John-Paul:
My name is John-Paul Ennis and I am a member of the Christchurch Road Steering group. I am one of the co-founders of the initial campaign to bring a community land trust to Lambeth, a place I have lived in my whole life, and where my family is from.
Our campaign started in 2015, when I was still at school and formed out of real lived experience of housing need. It came out of the need for a solution to unaffordable house prices in our area that was going to ensure that people like us had no hope of staying in the place we call home.
Community Land Trusts are not a new idea, but they are relatively unheard of in the UK. Our hope was to bring this concept to Lambeth so that we, as a community, could make a difference and find a way for the average person to afford to stay in our communities.
Just last year I negotiated on stage in front of thousands with the Mayor of London to get funding released for community-led housing. I have since joined London CLT as a member of staff to help continue our march towards genuinely and permanently affordable homes in Lambeth.
Costa:
My name is Costa, and I am one of the co-founders of the Christchurch Road Community Land Trust campaign.
The campaign began back in 2015, when JP and I were taking part in The Advocacy Academy social change fellowship during our last year of sixth form.
Working with Lambeth Citizens, we originally wanted to push for a Living Rent, inspired by Citizens UK’s Living Wage, which would centre the cost of living and people’s incomes into rents in London, but pivoted towards home ownership in 2016.
We’ve spent the six years since then building our community of supporters and working with Lambeth Council and the Greater London Authority to secure a site. Although our methods have changed over the years, the goal has always been the same—to bring genuinely and permanently affordable homes to Lambeth. We’re now closer than ever to achieving this goal.
