Cheap rents, quick repairs, a nice garden and a tennis court – what's the catch?
As young Londoners and key workers search for a home in the ruthless property market, here's a new – old – idea
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Please do sign up if you can. In the meantime, for this week’s long read, deputy editor Tom Foot explains how he manages to live in South Hampstead on a local reporter wage and puts forward an idea for people searching for solutions to London’s housing crisis.
LET’S be blunt: the number one issue for so many young north Londoners is finding somewhere to live, traumatised as they are by a shark-infested private rental market and impenetrable waiting lists for social housing.
Politicians agree it’s a crunch issue but have yet to spark much hope for those trapped in this impossible search, perhaps because of the opaque nature in which ‘affordable’ housing is talked about when new schemes emerge.
You are doing well if you are paying £1,000 a month for a small room in a shared house, but the horror stories of what is now expected for so little in return are all around. No wonder so many young people, working or not, are stuck living with parents.
And it’s not just the under 30s. Key workers are finding makeshift, imperfect one-off arrangements to ensure they are near, so local schools, hospitals, the fire stations, councils and so on are staffed.
Then there are the couples wanting to start families but realising that the only sensible option, financially at least, is to move away from the friends and community where they grew up. The trend of school closures and the shutting of the Royal Free’s maternity unit is not confusing to understand.
But what if I told you there was a place in one of London’s most expensive areas where rents are kept genuinely affordable at a third of the rate you might expect, repairs are carried out quickly, maintenance is not a problem and a communal green and tennis court is carefully tended?
I will not be alone in having seen the vast majority of my Camden school friends up sticks to start a family, and yet pretty much everyone I grew up within my block of flats are still living just a short walk away.
They are in charge of their own homes and families now, and their children are the ones out playing on the same green that we all grew up on. The children of these children will no doubt one day be doing the same.
How is this possible? We all live in the Fairhazel Housing Co-operative.
Next month, the Co-op – which owns and runs 131 flats as social housing in South Hampstead – is celebrating its 50th anniversary.
What better time to tell the story of how it came to be and how it has, against the odds, managed to survive to lay out a radical blueprint – still standing here in bricks and mortar – for how housing could be made affordable for more people.
