Steve Hoey is director of community land trusts at Leeds Community Homes, the organisation he started four years ago after a career witnessing the damaging effects that the housing crisis has on vulnerable people.
Leeds Community Homes is working with councils around the region to advise on sustainable housing while working on its own community builds.
What do you do?
I’m Steve Hoey, CLT director at Leeds Community Homes.
Before I was the director at Canopy Housing, a self-help housing project in Leeds, doing empty homes work and jobs creation.
What is the point of the project?
We are an enabler and a developer community-led affordable, environmentally-sustainably housing and we have an ambition to develop build renovate or enable 1000 homes over 10 years.
The hardest thing is that there is loads of demand and we can’t meet it all. That’s frustrating.
When was the moment you decided to do this?
Four years ago when I co-founded Leeds Community Homes.
Myself and a guy called Paul Chapelton from Lilac Co-Housing chatted and decided to start this to make more community-led housing happen in Leeds. I’ve got a passion for affordable housing, particularly for vulnerable groups, and I thought it would be good to build a coalition in Leeds.
We want to help create more affordable housing. I have been touched by the experiences of the people that I have encountered over the last 25 years who have been homeless and disadvantaged, being priced out of the housing market or not finding the support they need.
Meeting leaders of urban community land trusts in Birmingham
What’s been your proudest moment so far?
Our best moment was when we did a community share issue the winter before last. Our target was to raise £360,000 and when we hit it, on the final day, that was a great moment.
What’s been hardest?
The hardest thing is that there is loads of demand and we can’t meet it all. That’s frustrating.
We had a grant from Power to Change that allowed us to employ me and Jim, but we are run off our fees with individuals, local authorities, and other groups keen to get our support.
So it’s frustrating that there isn’t more resource to do more. But we’re working on that and this Community Housing Fund will hopefully help us do more.
What drives you when it gets hard?
My interest, dedication, and passion for affordable housing, wanting to use my skills more efficiently.
We have a great team and the board are all voluntary. People get involved and support each other, so that helps.
What’s the next step?
Putting a bid in for one of our current projects. We’re working with Leeds City Council looking at a piece of land in Armley in West Leeds.
We’re engaging with the community and talking about what they might like to see on that site – what number of bedrooms, affordability, for example.
We will be bidding into the fund for pre-planning development costs, our own time and some other experts, quantity surveyors and the like to help us get to the point where we can go to the planning process for development, which is in keeping with what the community want, and building some homes that they really need.
We’re also enabling other groups in Liverpool and Teeside and Birmingham and Bristol and trying to support people with that. We hope to expand.
The second stream of funding is supposed to be funding for umbrella organisation to launch a network, do a website, a training scheme and hopefully also some funding for the hubs.
If it comes through we will be trying to expand through that as well, but we’re also doing our own consultancy work for Kirklees and Wakefield Councils, plus talking to Bradford and Harrogate Councils.
We started off as Leeds Community Homes and now we are spreading out. So in two or three years we’ll hopefully be sustainable.
At sunny @lilacleeds for an exciting workshop to develop our #communityledhousing enabler hub pic.twitter.com/hMag4wSfSG
— Leeds Comm. Homes (@LeedsCommHomes) March 6, 2018
How did you vote in the EU referendum and why?
I voted remain.
I just think the EU is a great idea and I can’t believe we’re trashing it. People forget it was formed after the Second World War after years of horrific warfare and it was an attempt to get together and stop that.
The mess we’re in now trying to negotiate a bill just says to me how silly the whole Brexit thing was.
How will the outcome affect what you do?
That’s totally unknown. I can’t see it massively impacting the community housing sector, but there are concerns in the wider construction sector about supply chain, jobs and labour, so it could be there is a wider knock-on effect.
What would you say to someone looking to do something similar?
I’d say great, definitely look at it. It’s a growing sector, it’s had some real growth spurts, there’s lots going on and if you have a social conscience it’s a great way to do housing differently, empowering people to create the homes that they need.
There’s some interesting design stuff happening around environmental sustainability.
What does community mean to you?
Community is quite a broad term.
It can be a community of interest or a community of place, for example, when we did our share issue we had people all round Leeds and the wider country investing in us because they were a community of interest.
But community can be very place-based and geographical, or about personal relationships as well.
