Self-help housing – towards a greater role. Case study findings summary to inform consultation at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, December 2010

Abstract

Self-help housing ‘involves groups of local people bringing back into use empty properties that are in limbo, awaiting decisions about their future use, or their redevelopment. It differs from self-build housing which involves constructing permanent homes from scratch’. It responds to the bigger picture of entrenched problems in society today including homelessness and unmet housing needs, empty homes, unemployment and low levels of construction skills, planning blight, neighbourhood dereliction and fear of crime, and low levels of local economic activity and enterprise. Yet despite these potential benefits self-help housing remains a small scale and largely unrecognised part of the housing third sector. TSRC research has been exploring the reasons for this limited and the ways in which its potential could be harnessed by local groups and key partners and the types of policies that might enable this.
This case study report is one of a series of outputs from TSRC research on self-help housing. It was produced to present evidence drawn from eight case studies of a variety of models of self-help housing in different local contexts to inform a consultation with policy makers, funders, umbrella groups and self-help housing projects held at St George’s House, Windsor in December 2010. The report describes the case study projects and potential benefits of self-help housing in meeting a variety of public policy outcomes, and presents evidence on the barriers and enablers and critical success factors found in the case studies. It raises a number of questions that were explored further in the Consultation event leading to policy recommendations. It is published here to provide wider access to the TSRC research data on which the Consultation report to be published by BSHF draws. The TSRC working paper that preceded this work (Mullins, 2010) and a separate briefing paper on implications for tackling homelessness (Teasdale et al, 2011) can be downloaded from the TSRC website.