Homes From Empty Homes

>Amongst all the talk of falling house prices and a collapsing economy another threat to our housing is emerging, – rising vacancy. If trends continue numbers could well pass the million mark next year. Does it matter? You bet it does, in a country bursting at the seams with housing need, the prospect of homes for two million people sitting wasted is nothing less than a scandal. Or if you prefer, think of it this way; statistically speaking you now have a one in twelve chance of living next door to an empty home

So what help did the chancellor offer [...]

>I have just received the very sad news that Bob Lawrence died earlier today. For those of you didn’t know him Bob was the first Chief Executive, and indeed the first employee of the Empty Homes Agency. He led us for seven years before going on to become the director of housing in Montserrat following the volcano disaster. In recent years he has been a homelessness advisor at CLG. He was a passionate larger than life character and without him I very much doubt there would have been an Empty Homes Agency. We will miss him greatly.

>It’s not officially launched until next week, but ReportEmptyHomes.com is being used successfully already so what the hell. The simple idea behind this new website is that councils respond their citizens. The cynical may question this, but I think it works and I hope this new website proves it.

Enter a postcode or road and the website takes you to a mini map, click on where the empty property is, fill in a few brief details and send. That’s it. The empty property is reported automatically to the council and it will keep bothering them until they do something about [...]

>The Telegraph on Saturday helpfully pointed out that the core of the empty homes problem remains a private sector one. 85% of empty homes are privately owned and that proportion has not changed much despite the overall number going up. That is not, however, the same as saying that it is solely a private sector problem as this shocking report from Inside Housing shows that, according to recent housing corporation figures, not far off 10,000 housing association homes built for shared ownership are standing empty. Given that these figures are from a sample of just 215 housing associations; less than [...]

>Halifax bank cheerily announced last week that numbers of empty homes are dropping. Poor old Halifax, they’ve had a torrid time recently and I’m reluctant to pour cold water on one of the few apparently good news stories they’ve got.But sadly they are wrong. Or at least they have drawn a pretty odd conclusion from the data. I predict that sometime over the next year the numbers of empty homes in the UK is set to pass the million mark. It sounds unbelievable – Just a couple of years ago several people were talking about empty homes as a problem [...]

>Greenwich council are not very happy with me for being interviewed for tomorrow’s breakfast TV outside their notorious Ferrier estate.In the piece to be broadcast on BBC1 tomorrow morning, we discuss the national scandal of empty homes and how councils need to respond faster in a recession, to prevent the problem getting worse. The Ferrier estate, which has over 1000 flats that have been empty for more than four years, to my mind, illustrates the consequences of getting it wrong.

I am all for the regeneration of this estate, and perhaps when it is replaced in ten years time it will [...]