Empty Homes

Just come back from an excellent BRE day event on empty homes. The BRE are linking up with the Greg Clarke campaign (following on from his C4 programme) to refurbish 100,000 empty homes and put them back into use. As well as the burning enthusiasm for achieving much needed change in low value urban areas, the event was notable for the different models of refurbishment that it put forward. One example was the bringing together of semi-retired building professionals with local young people, struggling with lack of qualifications and employment opportunities, to refurbish empty homes. This provided the young people with new skills - a form of apprenticeship - with a viable way of improving a property to a lettable standard. Another was the sale of council-owned empty properties for £1 to local people provided they were willing to do the homes up and live in them for 5 years. Yet another model involved financial institutions, such as life or pension funds, putting up the funds for improving a portfolio of properties for rent, based on the long term retention of the freehold or leasehold and a business case that was able to show a financial return over 30 years, say. All these examples show the potential for beyond the current dominant paradigm of market-led development supported by subsidy and regulated more-or-less weakly by the planning system. It suggests that there are other ways of achieving desired urban change. Empty properties - domestic and commercial - are explicitly discussed in the book, as you will be able to see in the autumn.