Community Housing Through Collective Effort
GARETH STEVENS and MERLIN BETTS
Recently I met with Sarah Gomes Harris, a co-founder of the Hastings Rental Health (HRH) campaign, set up by a group of renters “fed up with being kicked out, priced out, and treated like rubbish by landlords for years.”
HRH initially focussed on demands that Hastings Borough Council and our local MP change housing policy by capping rents, controlling AirBnBs and second homes, and generally developing more affordable housing.
Sarah tells me: “With little to no hope of owning our own homes, we started campaigning for legislative change, as well as opening up conversations locally about what second home ownership does to the rest of a community on local wages in Hastings.”
But central and local government remain slow to respond, and the need for safe affordable housing is a matter of basic survival for many local people. Whether it’s about keeping warm over winter, saving enough money to buy food, or maintaining functional mental health: the home is vital.
Sarah has the beginnings of a solution, “A small group of us from HRH decided to tackle the problem head on by setting up a housing co-operative. We just can’t help others around us until our own foundations are stable. Housing is fundamental to our wellbeing. Mental health is reliant on rental health. We need and want to secure long-term affordable housing so we can get on with the business of living, working and supporting our community.”
By developing an independent and sustainable housing situation themselves, they are also finding model ways out of the rental mire that can be used by other communities.
Community Housing
HRH’s aim is to build, to create or purchase their own housing, owning it and maintaining it by a truly social co-operative model, in which there are no landlords or renters, just a housing co-operative keeping homes and their residents safe from selfish profit motives. Sarah emphasises the need to normalise this approach of community-owned housing.
Of course, there’s a lot to learn for anyone who wants to set up a housing co-op: bits of property law, relevant contracts, ways of raising funds, sustainable energy schemes, the list goes on.
HRH recently ran a successful crowdfunder to raise £800 for their co-op, partly for registration costs, primarily so that they learn from other co-ops around the country and begin building a guide that others can use to understand and join this community housing revolution.
Sarah says “The more co-ops there are, the more affordable life is for more people, the better our economy and the healthier our society. We are rooted in power and we have the power to do this collectively.”
The Campaign Goes On
Sarah and other HRH volunteers will be running the Hastings Half Marathon Sunday 26 March, originally to raise money for the crowdfunder but, having met their target surprisingly early, they’re giving any more money raised to Surviving the Streets. This will help James Robinson and his group run their digital food-banks and Woody Wood Community Garden, which grows healthy organic food for people on the estate.
She assures me that alongside the housing co-op, Hastings Rental Health will continue to campaign for fair rents, decent homes and caps on whole home Airbnbs. Surely it is initiatives like this and the tireless work of people like Sarah that will “save St Leonards” – not gentrification disguised as regeneration!
For more information visit: www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/hastingsrentalhealthhousingcoop or survivingthestreets.uk
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