Building more affordable homes is vital for the survival of rural communities
Illustration: Lynn Hatzius
The walls of our small cottage are used to a squash and a squeeze, like many old rural homes: tales of one, or two-up-two-down dwellings housing families of 12 (including second-generation married couples) still circulate from living memory.
With a daughter back from university and a son having finished and moved back home temporarily (with his girlfriend) into his tiny childhood bedroom, it can be said, we are in a bind. We’re far from the only ones.
Our downland village has four small developments of social or once-affordable houses, added-to each decade from the 1940s to the 1990s. Most are now privately owned and fetch big prices. Other cottages have been extended or knocked down, replaced by larger homes. There is a growing proliferation of barely occupied second homes and holiday lets, but there have been no new houses since.
Any move to build small, ‘affordable’ homes is met with objections that “there are no facilities, public transport, or jobs”. Which is partly true, but also related to the slow haemorrhaging from the village of a diverse social vibrancy, skills, economic activity and public services. Recently, yet another keyworker and their young family had to leave their long-term rented home, and then the village, because there was nothing affordable for them to buy or rent. The key worker was also a parish councillor who organised village fundraisers.
In a report published late last year, CPRE, the Campaign to Protect Rural England, stated “rural communities in England are facing an existential threat from a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing”. Nothing new, perhaps, but the situation has accelerated with ferocity and deepened into a crisis, fed by record house prices, stagnating wages and an increasing number of second homes and short-term lets.
THE CRUSHING REALITY
While our son and his girlfriend want to return to their university city, the situation is grimly familiar: estate agents make increasingly unachievable demands (six months’ rent upfront, with a home-owning guarantor earning more than £50k is standard). But in the past five years, house prices in the countryside (where wages are far lower) increased at almost twice
