affordable housing

Real Estate for Radicals: co-ops, community land trusts, communes, and squats

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The Real Estate for Radicals project features case study-based research on affordable community-owned housing (co-ops, community land trusts, communes, and squats) and their potential to advance housing as a human right.

Are Community Land Trusts a Way Out of the System?

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This autumn, builders will start work on Oakfield Road in Anfield. Many houses in this part of Liverpool have remained empty since the government’s failed ‘housing market renewal’ policy shipped people out, then stalled in 2008. Seven years ago, a group of residents formed a community land trust to bring nine terraces on Oakfield Road into community ownership. Now, instead of being demolished, they have been reimagined as cosy, energy-efficient homes, with space for local businesses, winter gardens, a market and a cafe.

We Used to Just Call These “Houses”

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We have a way in the modern world of rediscovering things that humans have always done but branding them as something trendy and a little alien. So it goes with the explosion of interest in “tiny houses” as an answer to what ails cities struggling to house and attract people.

The ironic thing about tiny houses is that they’re nothing new; it’s just that, in surprisingly recent memory, our culture had a different name for them. We called them “houses.”

Future Homes: The Rapid Rise, Fall, and Return of UK Social Housing

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The pioneering Dutch “Energiesprong” model – Dutch for “energy leap” – involves a major, whole-house retrofit to achieve a near net-zero energy home, typically including the fitting of an external “wall envelope” for insulation, as well as rooftop solar panels.

How a Cooperative Approach to Property Management can Build Collective Power

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The Community Land Trust (CLT) is an established and successful model for the creation of democratically governed permanently affordable housing, and most urgently in the face of the crisis, a tool to prevent the displacement of historic communities. T

Building the Future

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Around the world, new municipal movements are transforming the way we provide – and think about – housing. From campaigning against evictions to innovative forms of public housing to requisitioning empty properties and engaging many more people in decisions about how and where we live, municipal projects are responding to the global housing crisis, locally.