‘Homed- NOT Housed’
By: Act For Change Fund
Tags: Young People, Housing Crisis, Homelessness

The Warren Project, based in Hull, is one of 32 organisations supported through Act for Change Fund for young people to lead change and challenge social injustice. This article shares their response to homelessness & housing-related issues in Hull.

For some years now, the young people of The Warren had been coming to us with ever more worrying issues related to housing such as promised wrap-around support never materialising, infestation, damp, poor repairs, unresponsive or uncooperative providers, extortionate rents, congested HMOs, inappropriate accommodation — the list went on and on and more and more of our time at The Warren was devoted to unpicking housing-related matters on behalf of our young people. The most immediate and alarming of these issues was how quickly, and easily young people were threatened with eviction or indeed evicted — thus exacerbating the physical and mental-health related issues they had already been experiencing.

Our young people were becoming increasingly vocal about youth homelessness and poor quality accommodation — particularly around the experience of one young man — Andy, who had been made homeless just before Christmas (we managed to get him a flat on Christmas Eve). Andy said to us “Can’t the Warren just buy us a house?” — we said unfortunately not in time to help him, but we could begin to develop a plan that enabled us to buy more than one house and put young people in charge of how we did that.

Then we secured funding through the Act for Change Fund- a joint initiative between Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, working in partnership with the #iwill Fund. The first issue young people wanted to address through Act for Change was their need for homelessness to be seen by the public as an all-year round problem rather than a media-focus at Christmas (we have a lot of young people who are homeless/sofa-surfing- and also young people who are experiencing issues with the quality of their housing. Seventy-four young people on that issue alone at that point). They had seen the work of a local amateur photographer called Jason Shipley (who has taken portrait photos of some young people experiencing homelessness) and they wanted to work with him by showcasing his work in a public exhibition at The Warren. Unfortunately, I had to explain that from a safeguarding and logistical perspective it was only possible to have such an exhibition open to the public on one single evening and I advised them to be realistic about the limited impact it might have because of that one-night restriction and whether it was worth doing a single evening.

That advice was not well received — with one young person saying to me “People are always telling us to be realistic? This is The Warren — why can’t we just do it?” They were of course absolutely right. So we did just do it. The exhibition — titled ‘Our People’ was simple but incredibly impactful and two hundred and three people attended the evening (including the homeless people who were the subject of many of the photos) despite the fact that we’d had torrential rain all through the early evening. But the exhibition was primarily notable for the absence of some key invitees…- not a single member of any housing provider in the city (including the local authority) attended the event. Young people and staff were extremely angry about this — feelings that were expressed at the next meeting of The Thing (the Warren’s youth parliament).

Warren staff were tasked with the job of approaching the local authority’s housing team to ask why they were unable to attend given the seriousness of the matter and the relevance to their work. It transpired that there had been some genuine confusion at their end and some of them hadn’t received the invite. The upshot of that meeting is that The Warren now meets regularly (until Covid hit) with Hull City Council’s Housing Programme Strategy Leader and two of his project officers and we update them on all the housing issues experienced by young people. This in turn informs the council’s housing strategy. They have been very supportive and helpful.

But the really big outcome from the ‘Our People’ exhibition was kickstarted by a young person who said we should just build our own houses. We talked about that idea a great deal (and discussed what Andy has said before Christmas) and subsequently formed a housing team and set about gathering data and information to form a body of evidence to demonstrate the need for a youth-led housing cooperative. We turned this evidence into a funding application to the Lloyds Bank Foundation’s ‘Enable fund’- and we were successful, securing £15k to develop a feasibility study and proposal to take to housing funders. The working title of that proposal is ‘The Design for Life Tenancy’- and the local authority are giving us considerable support (and have recently introduced us to Homes England).

So — what at first seemed like a one-off exhibition that has limited potential impact, has in fact possibly sowed seeds of our young people taking control of their own housing crisis.

The young woman who said “People are always telling us to be realistic? This is The Warren — why can’t we just do it?…” was right after all. That’s how empowerment works.

At this point we began to work with young people to develop details of what such a model might look like — reinventing tenancy agreements: deciding what additional support young people required as tenants: looking at how the interior design of properties could maximise mental health etc. We now secured additional £3,000 which allows us to afford the services of community housing experts (from an organisation called Locality) to support with both registering as a housing provider and preparing an application for funding from Homes England to acquire property.

We then employed the services of an architect and now The Warren has planning permission to convert some of the space in its vast building into 4 apartments which will be the first phase of our Youth-led Housing Cooperative — which has now been rebranded by young people as Warren Homes. They insisted on dropping ‘Housing’ from the initiative as they wanted homes, not housing, and were at pains to point out the difference between being ‘housed’ and being supported to have a ‘home’. “‘Housing’ sounds like the council” was one remark that stood out.

As it stands, following consultation with Locality, we are preparing a funding proposal to Homes England to fund the first-phase (the 4 apartments) before immediately moving on to prepare the second phase of the plan which will hopefully be much bigger — with the hope of repeating these phases continually until we are either sufficiently addressing the housing needs of our cohort, or our young people ask us to shift our organisational focus elsewhere.

Some Key details on organisational structure of Warren Homes:

- The Warren will be the parent organisation and provide support services to tenant of Warren Homes;

- Warren Homes will be shaped by young people and the template tenancy agreement they draft (which has the working title Design for Life);

- Young People will be represented on the board of Warren homes as it is on the board of The Warren itself;

- Any staff appointed by Warren Homes must be interviewed and appointed by young tenants (as they are at The Warren);

- Warren tenants must subscribe to the Warren ethos of respect, tolerance, compassion, and unconditional positive regard (which will be enshrined in the Design for Life Tenancy Agreement);

- Young people will not be asked to leave a Warren Home when they are beyond the age limit for access to services.

Act for Change Fund is a £3.6 million partnership for organisations supporting young people working for change. The fund provides resources for young people to challenge social injustice, find ways of overcoming inequality and give voice to issues they are experiencing.

It is a joint initiative between Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, working in partnership with the #iwill Fund. Both foundations are acting as match funders and are awarding grants on behalf of the #iwill Fund.

The #iwill Fund is made possible thanks to £50 million joint investment from The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to support young people to access high quality social action opportunities.