Community empty homes initiative gets Nationwide Foundation funding boost

Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust has received funding from the Nationwide Foundation to enable 10 empty properties in Liverpool 8 to be turned into decent, affordable homes for people in need. The grant of £125,000 will go towards renovating and repairing currently unused properties in Cairns Street, Liverpool 8, that Liverpool City Council will transfer to the land trust. Operating as a community land trust guarantees that these houses will remain permanently affordable and any financial surpluses will be reinvested into the local area.

Once completed, the properties will be occupied by local people in housing need or those experiencing homelessness who would otherwise struggle to access decent, affordable housing. The work carried out will include training or apprenticeships to enable local people with few or no qualifications to develop skills in DIY and construction.

“Working with our partners, our approaches are based around simple, accessible, methods of construction that can be delivered locally – where the physical act of rebuilding is not only a way of boosting the local economy, but a public act that offers residents a direct hand in shaping the area’s development,” said architect Lewis Jones, who has advised the community land trust to date.

The grant has come from the Nationwide Foundation which is injecting £500,000 into empty homes projects, resulting in 52 new homes across the UK. This is an aspect of the Nationwide Foundation’s new Decent, Affordable Homes strategy.

“This is a great time for us - residents in Granby Four Streets have lived next to derelict properties for 20 years.We want to create new homes from these empty properties but also use this as a catalyst for wider growth in the area - building on the resilience, enterprise, initiative and creativity the community has shown,” said Hazel Tilley, who has been campaigning against demolition for nearly twenty years. “We’ve been running a fantastic community market in our streets for the past four years and transformed the area through large scale planting and painting. We want to build on these activities and re-invigorate the high street, offering a range of spaces of local enterprise and production – for eating and meeting, making and creating, buying and selling”.

This project forms part of a wider partnership to carry out an ambitious and imaginative project, to refurbish and regenerate the Granby Four Streets area. This partnership includesthe Community Land Trust, Terrace 21 Housing Co-operative, Liverpool City Council, Plus Dane Housing Association , Liverpool Mutual Homes and H-D Social Investments - whose substantial, low interest loan to the community land trust supported its application to the Nationwide Foundation.

Lisa Suchet, Nationwide Foundation chief executive says: “That the UK has so many empty properties which could be used as homes, whilst there is a severe housing shortage, is simply unacceptable. We have therefore identified Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust as an organisation which shares our passion for bringing empty properties back into use for people in housing need. The Nationwide Foundation aims to break down barriers to the creation of homes and tackling the empty homes crisis is one of our strategic interventions for doing this.”

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