How to buy an affordable home in London - BBC London

[Music] with the average property price in the capital currently at around 600,000 pounds growing numbers of us simply can't afford to stay but now there's hope on the horizon how do you fancy buying a modern three-bedroom home in the center of London for just over two hundred thousand pounds sounds incredible well thanks to an innovative not-for-profit organization it's now become a reality [Music] this former psychiatric institution in BO is being transformed into an affordable housing project where some of the homes have actually sold for a third of their market value if you look at London property prices I could never have afforded anything which would have met our needs in this area I would have had to have move out of London I would have had to have leave the job which I love where I've been working for many years bettan Lant one of the first to snap up a discount home on the site lives with her partner two children and they're rabbits my children have space to develop to express themselves to do their homework we can grow things along the terrace despite spending several years trying to climb London's property ladder this is the first time that Bevan fully considers herself a homeowner previously I was living in a shared ownership flat I owned one quarter earth flat and ideally I imagined that I would be able to eventually buy more but it didn't happen because the value of the flat kept increasing so whereas my share him in the same in it the rest of the flat became more and more expensive and I couldn't keep up with that average property prices in the capital are around 16 times the average salary so how does the London community land trust the organization behind this development enable families like Beth ins to buy their home on the cheap we've redefined affordability by basing the price of the homes we sell on local incomes so we worked on the basis that was commonly accepted years ago that a family shouldn't spend more than one-third of their household income on their housing so we can sell a one-bedroom flat here for a hundred and thirty thousand the developer who is selling exactly the same flat on the open market is selling it for half a million so London CLT is able to sell homes for about a third to half of market rate because we take the cost of land out of the cost of the house and so when people buy London CLT home they're not buying an asset they're not buying an investment they're buying a home and hopefully local wages will rise the cost of that home will rise a little bit but it's not gonna balloon and balloon as house prices are doing the land that CLT has built homes on so far has either been gifted by local authorities or purchased using grant funds the 23 affordable homes at Sant clements were also cross subsidized by private sales on the site yet whilst the costs were reduced for the CLT residents design and build standards are not this home is just incredible I'm probably still in shock with panoramic views of some of London's best landmarks Juliet's to bed penthouse would command well over 600,000 pounds she paid around 1/3 but it's the fact it is well built and safe that she appreciates most the home she rented before was anything but the home that I was renting even though it you know cost us an almost 2,000 pounds a month and almost all of our income was leaking you know the balcony wasn't fit you know wasn't fit for purpose and we couldn't use one of the rooms because it wasn't you know again water leaking through the electricity was almost a thousand pounds a quarter because of the way it was built over the years Juliet has experienced the very worst of properties that London's rental market has to offer people on low incomes I was living in temporary housing in East London and actually got cupboard monoxide poisoning from that house and ended up in hospital in a coma and that was quite something that affected me quite a lot that experience left Juliet with long-term health problems other residents in Clements say they also suffered poor housing in the past it was ridiculously tiny I could touch my living room wall from with both hands social worker Adrian says his former rental home was owned by rogue landlords it flooded ridiculously it was cockroach infested they were like mice and they were very brave mice they used to actually run at me rather than run away they're very confrontational mice and it was just a nightmare and at the point before my friend told me about this place I was looking at perhaps moving out of London Adrian's mortgage repayments for his spacious one-bed flat cost less than his previous rental home if he had not secured his new place London would have lost another key worker I can introduce you to Headmaster's who were leaving London because they can't afford to live here anymore the people we've rehoused are people who all thought we can't afford to live here we're gonna have to go somewhere else back in 2014 when he was mayor of London Prime Minister Boris Johnson came to sent Clements and back to the Community Land Trust as part of a campaign for more affordable homes but the scheme has yet to deliver in the massive numbers our capital so desperately needs it's sometimes frustrating that with so much housing need in London we still having 23 homes here 30 homes here I think it's taking sometimes their councils to understand the benefits and to see that it can really work but the appetite for this type of community-led housing seems insatiable absent Clements over 700 people registered an interest but there were less than two dozen homes available I kind of felt a little bit sort of it's a little bit like doing the lottery you do it you never think you're going to win but if you don't do it you're never gonna win to secure his new home Adrienne like all CLT applicants had to meet a list of requirements so the criteria was you live in the borough that the accommodation is you potentially work in the borough which I have done for well 15 years we allocate our homes to local residents have a connection to the community and our kind of journey with our residents at this point when we allocate our homes begins through helping them to get to know each other before they've moved in so we'll have kind of social events and we'll ask them to be involved in our AGM and invite them to be on our board and so they're really involved in the governance of the organization the CLT wants to ensure these properties will forever benefit local people truly in need of affordable housing so residents are only allowed to sell their homes to other CLT members I never really wanted to buy somewhere in order for it to be a kind of something that I could make money from I have somewhere to live that I love living recently the organization secured two new sites one entire Hamlet's and the other in Lambeth buying a beautiful modern home in central London for a third of its market value may seem like a pipe dream but it's becoming a reality for growing numbers of Londoners the Community Land Trust is sending shockwaves through the building industry proving that good affordable housing can be delivered benefiting not just families but whole communities you [Music]

Channel: BBC London

Views: 246,739

Keywords: BBC, London, News, Home, House, Affordable, How, How to, Buy, Housing, Inside Out

Id: LVGmGuRZOmE

Length: 8min 52sec (532 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2019