Building balanced communities to prevent homelessness

A balanced community offers a variety of housing types that meets the needs of different people at different stages in their lives. JDA Architects, tells us how building balanced communities can help prevent homelessness

Crisis estimates that there are over 200,000 homeless households in England alone. Homelessness is growing year on year.

Meanwhile, the UK housing market is characterised by rising unaffordability. The average UK property costs over eight times average earnings. The price to earnings ratio rose by 8% during 2021.

There is a lack of affordable housing. This is making it harder to address the housing crisis and homelessness.

But simply building more housing isn’t the long-term answer to homelessness. Increasingly, the emphasis is on homelessness prevention. This requires a multi-faceted approach, where housing supply is just one element.

It’s important to see homelessness in context. Breaking the cycle of homelessness requires different levels and types of support for homeless people. It must involve more than just the physical structures that house them.

Why prevention must be the focus

The UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) published a policy paper in 2019, assessing the effectiveness of homelessness prevention.

It reflects the growing importance of homelessness prevention as a pillar of policy. The CaCHE paper highlights the differences in approach between the different nations within the UK.

For example, homeless people in Scotland have greater statutory protection than elsewhere in the UK. This is due to the Scottish Government strengthening homelessness prevention duties.

Based on its examination of differing approaches, CaCHE has created a framework for different categories of homelessness prevention:

• Universal – preventing or minimising homelessness risk across the entire population
• Targeted – focussing on high-risk groups such as vulnerable young people and on transitions people experience when leaving care, prison or in-patient treatment
• Crisis – preventing homelessness where it’s likely to occur within 56 days
• Emergency – supporting those at immediate risk
• Recovery – preventing the recurrence of homelessness.

Where there are specific stress points, or at certain times of the year such as Christmas, the focus tends to be on emergency provision.

But CaCHE argues that the focus needs to be across all categories of homelessness prevention for it to be truly effective in the long term. This is the only way to work towards ending homelessness in the UK effectively.

The pressure on housing provision

Clearly, for the individuals and families that experience it, homelessness has a huge personal impact. It disrupts daily lives, impacts health and wellbeing and can lead to people becoming trapped in a downward spiral.

Local councils find themselves in the front line trying to tackle homelessness. Homelessness puts pressure on their housing stock and on the budgets they rely on to invest in homelessness prevention services.

The pandemic has disrupted council operations further, with waiting lists for housing nearly doubling in some areas.

There are pressing questions about how to house the homeless and also where to house them.

To prevent homelessness in the long term, local councils must look beyond crisis and emergency provision and focus on the recovery category of homelessness prevention.

This is about reconciling affordability with mixed forms of housing stock and accommodation and finding ways to integrate this provision with existing communities.

Homelessness is a sensitive issue. Councils make headlines for the wrong reasons if their perceived approach is insensitive. But these situations often arise where emergency or crisis responses are the main driving forces, rather than embedded, long-term prevention policies.

Breaking the homelessness cycle

Homelessness prevention needs to take place in context. You only break the cycle of homelessness if you provide more than accommodation.

People can rebuild their lives if they have access to resources that help them maintain stability.

These resources include:

• Access to employment training
• Support with bills
• Mental and physical health support.

Homeless people come from communities. Their barrier to recovery is that their status excludes them from these communities. They need to find a way back to benefit from the stability and support that a sense of belonging brings.

But how do you engineer this?

Building balanced communities

A balanced community offers a variety of housing types. This creates a housing ladder that meets the needs of different people at different stages in their lives.

This should encourage and enable a range of different people with varying lifestyles, incomes and living arrangements to settle within a community.

One way of preventing homelessness is to extend this mixture of housing types to include both owners and renters, and short-term alongside long-term tenancies.

The chief agents for carrying this forward are housing associations. They can:

• Develop and execute local authority strategies for preventing homelessness
• Pursue policies that allow individuals to apply for housing under different eligibility criteria
• Provide flexible and constructive solutions to housing applicants.

Delivering alternatives

Money alone is not going to prevent homelessness. Funding is an issue but it’s not the only one.

Local councils and registered providers (RPs) such as housing associations and developers must explore alternatives for building new forms of housing.

These alternatives include:

• Development of brownfield sites
• Allocating a minimum percentage of affordable housing on new schemes
• New designs for affordable housing
• Repurposing retail spaces
• Offering co-living options.

Where do we fit In?

As architects, we see ourselves occupying a position where the Venn diagram of different agencies and organisations overlaps.

With funding from Homes England, we work with housing associations, councils and developers to deliver architectural schemes that address the pressing issue of homelessness prevention using a specific strategy.

• Between them, RPs have hundreds of small sites under a quarter of an acre, typically occupied by asbestos-ridden garages. These under-used sites would have formed part of the housing stock that the local council transferred over to RPs. We can repurpose them for new housing developments.
• We maximise the housing potential of these small sites using dispensation for undersized units, creating practical housing designs that offer the best use of space for their eventual occupants.
• This approach has added benefits of reducing crime and anti-social behaviour and helping to create balanced communities.

There’s one more crucial group we can add to the Venn diagram, end-users. No preventative measure for combatting homelessness can afford to ignore homeless people themselves in determining positive outcomes.

Planning policies can help shape better and more balanced communities, but only if they involve communities and their residents.