In good faith: are churches the solution to the housing crisis?
James Derounian – great all round bloke and friend and sometime contributor to RSN events relates an interesting spin on approaches to tackling the challenge of rural affordable housing in this article. The meat of his report says:
“The long and the short of it is that our cities and villages desperately need an injection of affordable homes, not least as a contribution towards “sustainable development”, which government says lies at the heart of its draft National Planning Policy Framework.
One of the less obvious possibilities relates to the use of Church land and buildings for affordable housing. In fact the Goodman report did present evidence from researchers at the University ofGloucestershire on the use of Church of England land.
What then emerged was a genuine and spontaneous partnership of the committed, which reads a bit like a joke: an architect, a lecturer, an atheist, a lay preacher and assorted CofE representatives. What these nine individuals did was to assemble and set up an online portal, Faith in Affordable Housing , under the aegis of the national charity Housing Justice. This web resource is aimed at communities and congregations across England, so they may turn good intentions into bricks and mortar.”
Towards the end of November I am sitting down with the Lincoln Diocesan lead on the Glebe, the manager of the County Council’s Farm Estate and the Land Agent for the Brocklesby estate to talk about the strategic issues and opportunities linked to creating a regular dialogue over the management of over 50,000 acres of land inLincolnshire. Not that our agenda will be specifically around social housing but it will be around the broader community benefits and opportunities which an informed ongoing dialogue around the management of large areas of agricultural land in a rural County might offer. I think more large rural authorities should be doing this and if you want to know a bit more about how we got to where we are in this context please drop me a line.