Community-led housing needs professionalism as well as passion
Locally based, community-led housing groups can play an important role in solving England’s deep-seated and long-running housing crisis
The UK is facing an affordable housing crisis, with the prospect of buying a first home increasingly out of reach, compounded by increasing in-work and fuel poverty.
Linked to this is a crisis of sustainability: buildings account for 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions, and yet our homes are among the least energy-efficient in Europe. At the same time, most new homes aren’t designed to encourage more sustainable lifestyles.
One Planet Affordable Living (OPAL) helps community-led housing groups vision, plan and build sustainable and affordable homes.
OPAL works with community-led housing groups during four stages of activity:
The research behind OPAL
Working in partnership with Oxford-based architecture and design collective Transition by Design, Bioregional ran a two-year action research project to develop a community-led approach to housing delivery that brings together One Planet Living – our framework to achieve true sustainability – and affordable tenure models.
The project, supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, builds on existing research we carried out with Transition by Design to develop an alternative housing approach that would be replicable across the UK.