Affordable Housing Institute : US

[An English-to-American glossary may be found here.]

 

In a recent post I listed five UK innovations the US ought to explore importing:

 

UK innovations worth US study

1. Shared ownership

2. Housing Associations.

3. Corporate financing applied to affordable housing portfolios.

4. Right-to-buy.

5. Stock transfer.

 

If it were as easy as just pushing a button …

As to the last of these, when recently in London to talk at 11 Downing Street, I got a tour, courtesy of Tom Titherington (Group Business Development Director) and the capable team at Hyde Housing, of a large pending example of one of them: stock transfer, a proposal to shift ownership and management responsibility for 1,840 homes in Lewisham, a large borough southeast of London city center.

 

 

Stock transfer

The layman’s definition

1. Deeding of ownership in an existing social housing scheme from the local authority to a housing association (or special-purpose subsidiary thereof)

2. Transfer price is £1, plus an assignment of all (x) benefits such as authority subsidy flows, rights, and (y) costs such as operating responsibilities (including renovation, repair, upkeep, maintenance, management, and administration).

3. Effective only if approved by a majority of residents voting in a special plebiscite.

 

(The only US transaction type even remotely analogous is the privatization of US on-post military housing, about which I know something based on my experience as part of the University of Maryland educational team teaching on-post military housing staff how to think about privatization and housing as an economic asset. More on this subject in future posts.)

 

History of Lewisham. Unusually for cities (New York is the only example that comes too mind), London is administratively divided into boroughs; Lewisham (rhymes with shrewish-um) sits about three crow-fly miles southeast of downtown. Once part of the countryside, as evoked by its main thoroughfare the Old Kent Road (which itself began life circa 43 AD as a Roman road of conquest to their capital at Londinium, such is the history of English cities), it is today a residential, widely varying but mainly blue-collar, jumble of dense urban living.

 

Note English flag in the window?

Roughly 13.5 square miles southeast of central London with one toe on the Thames,

 

Squeezed among Southwark, Greenwich, and Bromley

Lewisham has always been among London’s more densely populated areas (averaging about 18,300 per square mile); indeed, as shown in this remarkable graph, its population peaked in 1925 and then fell for fifty straight years:

 

Like many other urban areas, Lewisham hit bottom in the mid-Seventies and has rebounded some since then:

Even today, it is still among Britain’s more deprived areas, ranking 57 out of 354 (where 1 is worst):

 

The more purple, the more deprived

 

New Cross Gate stock transfer to Hyde Housing.

Lewisham’s housing stock. Like any other mature urban area, Lewisham visually presents a motley but interesting collection of row houses, semi-detached, mid-rise, and high-rise, a vast swathe of it operated by Lewisham’s local authority, which owns 36,000 apartments, spread out all over the borough:

 

 

One has to admire and appreciate such quality information so readily accessible

If we presume 3 people per apartment, that means just under half of Lewisham’s population lives in council housing, a staggering fraction under direct government operation, and one which, even if rare in the UK, would be inconceivable in the US.

 

The local authority stock. Though built in a concentrated period from after World War II through the early Seventies, the Lewisham stock is widely diverse in location, configuration, and tenancy. Some of the housing is in good condition and well cared for:

 

 

And some isn’t:

 

 

And you should see the panoramic shot …

 

In any case, there it is — the property, in its current condition.

What’s going to happen to it?

 

You can’t turn the pages until tomorrow

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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