Knowle West Media Centre has launched a community-led pilot to deliver affordable housing on council estates in Bristol.
The project at Knowle West seeks to deliver the first of a potential 200 family homes with backing from Homes England and Nationwide Foundation.
The duo have agreed to provide a combined £320,000 to kick-start the community initiative with a 16-home pilot dubbed We Can Make.
The low-density estate in south Bristol is home to around 12,000 people, with a large number of small sites suitable for single houses.
Project lead Melissa Mean said: “It is a bottom-up initiative working with the resources that the community has – that is skills and a large number of microsites.
“We describe this development as urban acupuncture, pinpointing exactly where somebody has housing need and you are able to provide that housing at that point of need.
“It is not speculative development, it is about communities pulling in and meeting their needs on their terms. It is about giving breathing space and resilience to existing communities.”
KWMC has identified 2,000 microsites, 10% of which could be developed. It has built a transportable prototype house designed by local architects at White Design. The charity will use the finance to bring the first sites through to planning, with an application to be submitted in March 2020.
Knowle West has a community-based digital fabrication factory which will also be used to provide modular housing as part of the project.
We Can Make will look to provide “genuinely affordable” homes for people in the estate. The first 16 will be at social-rented levels, but KWMC hopes to set rents at a third of average income for the region, as well as offering shared-ownership. The homes will be available for people in the estate, for example people looking to downsize or those living in cramped conditions who need larger homes.
“The idea is that the sites get assembled into a community land trust so they are affordable in perpetuity,” said Mean.
“We are piloting how to do, in terms of design, land assembly, legal and financial around that and then these tools will be able to be used by other communities.”
KWMC has identified six other low-density estates in Bristol as futures for community-led schemes and it is has also received interest from other regions in the South, including Brighton and Kent.
Mean said: “There is a real hunger about trying to do housing in a different way that is genuinely community-led.”
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