There have been a fair few stories over the last two or three weeks about significant numbers of empty homes in Durham mining villages near Easington which demonstrate that the issues associated with "low demand" - and the search for solutions - are still very much alive.
In the news stories it is Horden in particular which has been singled out, with a claimed 130 empty homes owned by Accent housing association now slated for disposal and reportedly another 130 to follow.
Factoids
Most of the key elements in the story seem to be discussed in a
Channel 4 News clip and a
story the following day and could be summarised as follows:
- the "broken window" effect means that the level of vacancy is a major deterrent to people moving in and is thus self-perpetuating
- many of the empties (most?) are owned by Accent housing association, which is planning to dispose of them in the open market
- Accent says that 67% of its two-bedroom homes were let to single people, mostly unemployed, and the bedroom tax was "the straw that broke the camel's back"
- nevertheless when they converted a two-bedroom home into a one-bedroom it apparently still could not be let
- there was a significant decline in social conditions over an indeterminate number of years but that did not follow directly on the closure of the colliery
- Accent failed to sell the homes for £1 each to Durham County Council, which claimed the homes needed too much work
- there are claims that Accent failed to keep the homes in good repair
- it is claimed by some that two-bedroomed Victorian terraced houses are so little in demand that they should be considered obsolete
- there are 11,000 households on the waiting list
- homesteading is a popular option amongst those seeking solutions.
Bigger picture
What has been little discussed are the broader regeneration issues such as employment and also the extent to which problems have emerged in, or have been created by, the private housing market (eg the incidence of poor quality private rented accommodation let by disengaged private landlords). A survey by the local residents' association indicates that 220 properties are empty which might be taken as evidence that there 90 vacant private sector homes alongside the social housing.
A case study
Although posing some problems that are different from those of Liverpool's Welsh streets - which, being within walking distance of the centre of the city, might have lent themselves to "organic" gentrification had the nuclear option of enforced gentrification not seized the imagination of the powers that be - the locational factors at Horden are not totally disadvantageous either. The village is on the Durham heritage coast and
a railway station is being built that might reasonably be expected to make a significant difference to the desirability of the village as a place to live.
The priority is to find solutions; but at the same time, there is a need for some thorough research here that would plot the causes and trajectory of the decline in more detail, explore the solutions, and provide a template for
earlier interventions elsewhere. On the evidence supplied it is easy enought to conclude that Accent's responses have not been imaginative or timely enough to address the emerging difficulties, a point
made quite strongly by the local MP who also accuses the HCA of failing to intervene. But perhaps it is all too easy to point fingers: it would certainly demand an exceptional combination of leadership and a sophisticated, multi-agency place-making strategy to tackle the diverse underlying issues involved, which are not all under Accent's control (the bedroom tax being a case in point).
Local residents, with support from community housing expert Jo Gooding, are
now mobilising to create some alternatives to outright sale in the open market. It is this kind of energy—the kind of energy that large bureaucratic organisations can rarely supply— which might turn things around. The hope would be that this could build sufficient momentum to decisively reverse decline: the fear, that it would be too little, too late.
And the need for a more strategic approach with other players involved is well illustrated by the saga of Horden's late-running railway station. The original one was axed by Beeching in 1962 and the new one, called Peterlee, is now scheduled to be opened in 2016, but that will be nearly thirty years after the colliery and power station were closed in 1987, destroying the local economy. Taking into account this tardy response from the masters of the region's infrastructure (whoever they are and have been), the thought occurs that perhaps it is not the houses that have fallen out of fashion so much as the people who live in them. Hopefully a resurgent residents' association can put them back on the map.
Other stories and information
