Blogs

Parish Council Meeting

Parish Council Paper I recently wrote a paper on starting a Community Land Trust for Waterbeach Parish Council. I was asking for their support for my aim of starting a CLT. I explained the difficulty young people have getting a home in the Cambridge area with prices being so high. I also explained the benefits of having a CLT, how it can help with genuinely affordable housing and help the community lead development.

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Where does a CLT get land from?

The Aim of a CLT The purpose of a CLT is to develop affordable housing to support the community in perpetuity. In order to be able to do this a CLT needs to have access to land. A lot of people have rightly been asking where this would come from. I want to briefly discuss this. How a CLT can acquire land A CLT can get land in many different ways, according to CLTEast:

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Call for a Steering Group

Looking for Volunteers We are looking to form a Community Land Trust and to do that we need to get together a collection of people who are interested in forming a steering group or want a say in how the CLT is run. If you think this is you then please contact us or tell us you are interested when you join the mailing list. Without more interested people this idea won’t get off the ground and it could really benefit the community so please get involved if you are interested or have relevant experience and skills!

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A Plan For Waterbeach Affordable Housing and Self-Building

The following article was published in the Feb 2018 edition of the Beach News. With house prices being so high in the Cambridge area, owning a home is a challenge for young people in the village. Even with a good job and saving hard it can take a long time to build up a deposit. It is even more difficult if you are renting, indeed market rents themselves can be difficult to afford.

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New Civic Housebuilding - Shelter Report

Shelter have produced an excellent report about why housebuilding in the UK doesn’t work and what we could do instead. The full report is available on Shelter’s website. Speculative Housebuilding The UK doesn’t build enough houses, and the reason for this is because most are built by the speculative housebuilding model. That is land is bought by the big house builders and then houses are built and then sold.

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RIBA Space Standards - The Case for Space

New Houses Are Small You may have thought where you were looking at new build houses that they are smaller than older houses and too small to comfortably meet the needs of families. RIBA Space Standards Report The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) have released a report looking at the size of new build homes and showing that they are indeed smaller than the recommended standards for houses. In their report “Space Standards for Homes - #HomeWise” they find:

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Neighbourhood Plan Meeting

I met with the Neighbourhood Plan group today to propose the idea of setting up a Community Land Trust for Waterbeach. One of the emerging Objectives of the Neighbourhood Plan is access to truly affordable housing for local people. Work carried out by Cambridge ACRE on behalf of the group has already found that there are more than 100 people with a connection to Waterbeach on the affordable housing register, and there are likely many more who aren’t officially on the list.

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