Could community-led cooperative housing offer a solution to the borough’s social housing shortage?

As Balfron Tower transitions to luxury rentals, Glenkerry House remains a beacon of affordable, community-led housing, a model that could offer a sustainable solution to the country’s wider housing challenges.

Looking out the window from the kitchen of Katie John’s apartment on the top floor of Glenkerry House, the first thing that comes to mind is how beautiful the view is. 

Below is Jolly’s Green and the River Lea, then the urban sprawl of East London, before it gives way to the green countryside. To the right, the view is dominated by Balfron Tower; which, like Glenkerry House, is part of the Brownfield Estate. 

Both buildings are designed by Ernő Goldfinger in his trademark Brutalist style and incorporate his utopian ideals towards social housing. 

Today, there couldn’t be a bigger difference between the two. 

Balfron Tower has been converted into flats for private sale, with no social housing kept. Poplar HARCA, the housing association that runs Balfron Tower, decided to ‘privatise’ Balfron Tower to fund social housing elsewhere.

The flats went unsold. Now, Apartments in Balfron Tower have been advertised for rent instead. Way of Life, the property management company that claims to lay “the foundations for renters to make a home”, has recently listed apartments for rent at Balfron Tower. One-bedroom apartments start from £1,715pcm while four-bedroom apartments start at £3,765pcm. 

Currently, the building’s only residents are a family of Peregrine falcons rehomed to the top of the building’s external tower. 

In stark contrast, Glenkerry continues to live up to Goldfinger’s utopian vision of affordable housing. While Balfron Tower is the more famous building of the estate, Glenkerry is perhaps more revolutionary. It is a cooperative housing association. Instead of being run by the council or a large housing association, it is run by the building’s residents.

This model allows affordable and high-quality homes for those who live there.

The importance of this comes across clearly from Vicky Dale, who lives in Glenkerry House. She simply states: ‘If I had to leave this place, I couldn’t afford to live in London’.

This article explores if community-led housing such as Glenkerry House is the solution to Poplar’s affordable housing crisis. It is the fourth and final article in a series that has explored Poplar’s social housing.

The first article reflected on the utopian ideals of architects such as Goldfinger that inspired post-war social housing in Poplar. Much maligned, rightly or wrongly, the housing developments of Balfron Tower and Robin Hood Gardens were built with the idea that there should be a large quantity of high-quality social housing.

Far from those utopian ideas, today there is a social housing crisis.

The bulk of new social housing is delivered by private developments that are required to provide a certain percentage of social housing. The second article in this series investigated the nature of social housing in these new developments. It found that developers systematically prioritised location, light, accessibility and access for private housing at the expense of social housing. Some developments still used poor doors, where private and social residents had to access the building in different locations and using different lifts.

Quality is only one-half of the affordable housing crisis. Quantity is the other.

As the third article revealed there is simply not enough housing. The number of council homes run by the council has halved in Tower Hamlets over the past twenty years. Housing associations try and fill the gap, but there is simply not enough affordable housing for people who need it. It is now normal to wait for two years before getting social housing, and some people have waited a decade.

Does community-led housing like Glenkerry House offer an alternative? A solution where there is enough high-quality affordable housing for those who need it?

The same cooperative housing association has managed Glenkerry since residents first moved in. Completed in 1977, the 14-floor building houses 79 generously sized flats ranging from one to four bedrooms. Goldfinger’s design of interlocking flats spread over two floors means there is only one corridor for every three floors. This means flats could be larger, maximising living space. It was intended to encourage interactions between residents; part of his attempt to create ‘streets in the sky’.

Katie John explains how the Glenkerry Co-Operative works, creating a system run by the community, for the community.

‘Everybody who owns a property in this block is a leaseholder. And we elect a management committee from among our leaseholders…it’s customary for us to serve a three-year term, maximum. And then you have to stand for re-election or resign.’

The residents ‘basically run the entire block’. This includes interviewing prospective new residents, managing financials, day-to-day maintenance, and larger maintenance.

This is, unsurprisingly, not an easy task. ‘We just recently had an external redecoration done, which included a survey of the condition of the block the works in total came to just over a million pounds.’

Running the co-operative may not be an easy task, but the benefits are clear.

All homes at Glenkerry are sold at 50% of market value. When applying to buy a house requirements include not having owned a house before and earning below a certain salary threshold. It provides a chance for people who wouldn’t normally be able to afford a home. The residents’ proactive and reactive governance keeps the building in good condition.

Another benefit that Katie and Vicky both emphasised was the sense of community that the co-operative model fosters. ‘I think it’s great that we do function as a community.’

‘We’re not like many blocks, even round here. Where people live their lives, and nobody knows their neighbours. We have social events, and we have a newsletter.’

For Katie John, the difficulties from the hands-on work required by the co-operative model are far outweighed by the positives. ‘Going forward, I don’t see why Glenkerry couldn’t continue perfectly well’.

More than that, she sees no reason why cooperative housing like Glenkerry can’t be more widespread: ‘You could have schemes like ours across the country’.

That view is also held by Community Led Housing London.  A non-profit organisation part of the Co-Operative Development Society, they advise, support, and educate groups of people who wish to create their own community-led housing.

Working across the capital, they have helped communities work from conception to completion to deliver houses that suit their needs. It intends to deliver “long-term homes, not financial assets”. This includes in Tower Hamlets. Over the past couple of years they have worked with several communities developing housing including RODE housing co-operative at Piggot Street in Poplar.

Levent Kerimol, Director at Community Led Housing London describes community-led housing as being ‘where people play a leading and lasting role in providing their own homes.’

Why a group wishes to develop community-led housing varies significantly. Often ‘it is motivated by something that’s not being provided through conventional means. I think in London, in particular, obviously affordability is the motivator’.

Levant Kerimol explains that a big positive from community-led housing is ‘a sense of empowerment, there’s a sense of control in housing’ for the people involved.

‘Councils or Housing Associations, or even private developers, they’re not providing housing for people. Even the general sort of charitable mindset is one of beneficiaries from on high’.

His point is that when it comes to housing, people are customers, nothing more. 

‘Community Housing has more of a sort of mutual element, there’s been more self-provision of people taking and doing things for themselves.’

However, within the current system, community-led housing struggles to address the issue of quantity in social housing. The work by Community Led Housing London is averaging 30 to 40 homes a year.

This was the case in Tower Hamlets. The self-build affordable homes plan approved in 2021 would see community-led building of homes on four council-owned sites that were deemed unviable for regular development. Across the four sites only a few dozen homes would be able to be built. 

Despite the small scale, there was the opportunity to develop high-quality affordable homes for people from the local community. 

A February 2022 document from Tower Hamlets Council that advised groups on how to bid for the sites explained how ‘the council aims to make it easier for potential community-led housing groups and individual self-builders to access the land they need to deliver more affordable housing in the borough.’

The plan guaranteed affordability in the long-term. The idea was that Section 106 agreement would be made between the Council and the community housing group to develop the site. This agreement requires a group developing a site to meet certain requirements in order to receive planning permission. In this case, the requirement was for the homes to remain affordable in the future. The Council also promised a long 250+ year lease. With these two measures, ‘delivering affordability in perpetuity’ would be guaranteed. The homes would be affordable forever. 

However, no homes were built.

The land for community-led housing at Piggot Street was made available by the then-Labour Mayor of Tower Hamlets John Biggs at the start of 2022. The new Mayor Lutfur Rahman cancelled the affordable community housing scheme in 2023 by executive decision. 

The announcement stated the land would instead ‘be brought forward to deliver, if possible, social housing for rent, in line with his [Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s] strategic priority to deliver social homes’.

Visiting the patch of Piggit Street that RODE housing was to develop, there is no mark of their housing project that could have provided homes for their little community. Nor, any new council houses. 

The small concrete and dirt block is overgrown with weeds and littered with rubbish. A black tarpaulin long deserted flaps lazily in the wind. Green wire fencing put up to stop anyone entering is the only addition in the past few years and a rusted padlock shows how long it has been since anyone has been inside. An old ‘No Ball Games Sign’, now pointless thanks to the fencing, and a deflated pink Eid Mubarak ballon are the only signs of life.

The political whims that ended the Piggot Street development show the difficulty in bringing community-led housing to fruition. Levent Kerimol acknowledges it is no ‘magic’ solution. However, he also believes in its potential. Pointing to several European countries where community-led housing is much bigger, he says ‘it could be a bigger part of housing, but it’s just not geared to that sort of way in the UK.’

Community-led housing, as demonstrated by Glenkerry House, offers a real alternative to affordable housing in Poplar. An idea that Community Led Housing London still champions.

However, no solution is magic. It is a testament to the hard work of the community that Glenkerry House is still thriving, but it would not have existed without the funding that built it before creating the co-operative to run it. As shown by Piggit Street, without such initial investment or support it is hard to build at scale. The final outcome remains on the whims of politicians.

Consecutive mayors have loudly promised more affordable housing and laid out strategic plans for more council housing. 

Yet the reality is that the number of council homes in Tower Hamlets is the lowest it has ever been and more people are waiting for social housing than ever before. 

And even if more housing is built, what guarantees are there that it will remain in stock and afforable? Social housing built in Poplar during the 60s and 70s has been demolished, as we saw with Robin Hood Gardens, or converted to private properties like Balfron Tower. 

The community-led RODE housing would have guaranteed affordability in perpetuity. And the hard work of residents has ensured Glenkerry Co-Operative remains affordable and well-maintained decades after being built. 

Before leaving Glenkerry, Katie John shows me the view from the other side of her apartment. Designed by Goldfinger with double-facing windows, the kitchen looks east out of London, while the sitting room looks over to the City.

As I look, it strikes me, how much other affordable housing in London can be found on the top floor of a high-rise with views as good as this? 

If you enjoyed this article, please read the first three parts of this series here: Streets in the sky: The utopian dreams of Poplar’s social housing, Poor doors, busy roads, and little sunlight: How affordable housing gets the brunt end, and Examining Poplar’s decline in council housing over the past 20 years