In this episode of the Rural Homelessness Podcast, Matt McChlery discusses how modular housing can help address rural homelessness. He is joined by Lewis Herbert, the manager of Allia Future Homes, and Daniel Renn, the Allia Future Homes Housing Development Lead. They explain that modular housing involves constructing sections of a building in a factory and then transporting them to the site for assembly. Modular housing offers benefits such as speed, cost-effectiveness, quality control, sustainability, and flexibility. It can be used in various sectors, including housing for the homeless. The challenges of modular housing include overcoming the stigma and lack of awareness, navigating building codes and regulations, and transportation logistics. The hope for the future of modular housing is mainstream acceptance, supportive policies, innovation, and wider use to address the housing shortage and homelessness crisis.
Websites
ferryproject.org.uk
Allia Future Homes website
Takeaways
- Modular housing involves constructing sections of a building in a factory and then transporting them to the site for assembly.
- Modular housing offers benefits such as speed, cost-effectiveness, quality control, sustainability, and flexibility.
- Modular housing can be used in various sectors, including housing for the homeless.
- Challenges of modular housing include overcoming stigma and lack of awareness, navigating building codes and regulations, and transportation logistics.
- The hope for the future of modular housing is mainstream acceptance, supportive policies, innovation, and wider use to address the housing shortage and homelessness crisis.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the Rural Homelessness Podcast
01:05 Introduction to Alia Future Homes
06:57 Problems and Challenges in the Current Housing Situation
11:43 Benefits of Modular Housing
13:09 Affordability of Modular Homes
15:06 Modular Housing for the Homeless
21:11 Use of Modular Housing in Jubilee Place
24:05 Modular Housing for Rural Homelessness
26:14 Challenges and Hopes for the Future of Modular Housing
29:10 Call for Support and Collaboration
This is the Rural Homelessness Podcast, where we discuss the important issues around rural homelessness, hear from those affected by it, and offer some solutions. Brought to you by the award-winning Homelessness Charity, The Fairy Project, welcome to the Rural Homelessness Podcast. Now hello and welcome to this episode of the Rural Homelessness Podcast. I'm your host Matt McCleary, thanks so much for clicking over and joining us today. Now on today's show, we're going to be talking about how modular housing can help to address rural homelessness. And I'm joined on the show by Lewis Herbert, who is the manager of Allia Future Homes, and also Daniel Ren, who is the Allia Future Homes Housing Development Lead. Let's welcome them to the show. Well hello Lewis, welcome to the Rural Homelessness Podcast. Hi. And hi Daniel, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, good to be here. And so today we are speaking about modular housing and how that kind of wall fits in with rural homelessness, and of course, this is something you guys live and breathe. So before we launch deeper into the questions, let's just start off by explaining a little bit more about Allia and Allia Future Homes and what they do. So Lewis, can you tell us more about Allia? So Allia was set up by my boss Martin Clark and a guy called Tim Jones. It's based in Cambridgeshire. It runs business centres for small businesses and charities. It also raises funds, so it has a finance arm. And that basically works the money markets, particularly for housing associations, but also creates bonds for charities and has helped quite a lot of charities locally. It recycles the surplus, it doesn't have shareholders and it's committed to helping social enterprises like the ferry project, tacking inequality and the whole range of issues, developing managers of charities, climate change, green energy. It's a forward thinking company. And how does Allia Future Homes fit into this sort of umbrella organisation? So Martin Clark's a brave soul and he believed in creating supported modular home communities. So he was on the lookout for land from about 2018 before creating the first community assisted by Christ, the did redeemer church on Newmarket Road in Cambridge, where he was able to work with them as the land owner and with Jimmy's Cambridge, the version of ferry project that does most work in Cambridge for homeless people and former rough sleepers. And that effectively created the first community, along with my able assistant or my able partner more like Daniel Ren, we're now a team of two supported by Allia and Martin then created with Keith Smith and the ferry project, really amazing scheme in Jubilee Place, which is six homes, it enables people who were previously rough sleeping or homeless into what we would call transitional accommodation, and then we'd hope that they move on to permanent rental homes because effectively what we're trying to do is help people through a period of recovery who can then rebuild their lives and be independent again. Mmm, really good. And just so our listeners are aware, we've already started talking about modular housing and could you explain Daniel, what is modular housing and how is it different to regular housing? Sure, it's actually a pretty simple modular housing involves constructing sections or modules of a building in a factory environment and then transporting those modules to the site for assembly, whereas traditional homes are usually entirely built on site. So would people kind of picture this as like being a caravan home or is that something slightly different? It's different, it's higher quality, it's more like you can imagine it as like playing Lego for adults, but high quality Lego, so you have many many options you can build on the ground, you can have new stories on existing buildings, and most of the time you don't even spot from the outside that it's modular, once you build a sacedon or a wolf on top. So yeah, now it's quite different to color and housing. Okay, and because it's mostly built in a factory and not on site, are you able to get planning permission for things like that or mortgages or how does that work? Yeah, you're able to get those, but it's not easy. So the modular market is quite new, I would say, at least for like certifications or like getting insurances or financing on those homes, but there are ways to do it. So there is a certification called Bullpass, and that certification tells you these homes are built to our quality, which will last at least 60 years, and therefore you'll get a mortgage on that, for example. Right, okay, that's interesting, we'll dig into modular housing a little bit more later on, Lewis, let's come back to you, we've got this modular housing model that you guys are kind of championing, but that obviously highlights that there's problems with the regular housing method. What are some of the problems or challenges that you see that are facing the current housing situation in Britain? Well, we're in a housing emergency, we haven't been building enough affordable rent homes. For most of my lifetime, and I'm 69, so since the mid 70s, there's been a failure to build affordable rent homes, there's been lack of government support for council homes, and there is just a dearth of housing, and that applies in rural areas, it implies in Cambridge and London, we've got a national crisis, I mean, that the figures are appalling, we've got 120,000 households currently in temporary accommodation, like a family of five that's got two rooms in a guest house, which isn't even in their home community, that's over 300,000 people in often substandard temporary homes, and yeah, we've got wider challenges, we've got 130,000 young people who are either homeless, or they're at risk of being homeless, they're so for surfing, they've not got a home, and as people listening to this, we'll realise, having a home is actually a main foundation before you can actually feel like you're a human being, rough sleeping rose 28% last year, and it's been a 70% rise in the number of massively vulnerable women rough sleepers, so I think the problem Matt is we've got an emergency that's been stoked up, particularly over the last 14 years, where the only focus seems to have been on people who can afford to buy a home, and it's 40 years, it will be 20 years before we get on top of this problem, and so that's why we've got a focus Matt on the opportunity of efficient modular homes, low energy, really well designed, because we will continue to need what we call not temporary, but transitional homes for at least two decades, and then people can move on into better homes, so we need to see a government and we're in an election year, we need to see the government and people might be know a bit more about who that government is when this is shared, who is actually going to invest and ensure that we start that 20 year building program now, where people are in real dire straits, children are not getting the kind of environment, if they're being moved from one piece of temporary accommodation to another. And that's one of the possible sort of broader sort of national solutions to the problem, but what are some other ways that we can try and solve or address these problems and challenges you've just highlighted? So I think that it definitely needs to be a targeting of support for homeless charities, despite the ferry project, like the light project in Peterborough, Jimmy's in Cambridge, so we need government to target help at the front line, we also need the government to do what's called sorting out the local housing allowance, so that rents vary remarkably between Chatteras and Whizbeach, Peterborough and Cambridge, so the rent levels just need to then be taken into account in the benefits that people get, so if somebody's out of work or they need to get support, that should include the forecast of being able to rent somewhere, so there's a whole package of changes needed and it's not cheap, but we're talking about people who are living in poverty, we're talking about people who are forced to sleep in tents and sleep rough, the very people that ferry project tries to help, we've got to help the people and they've got to be supported. Thank you, so Daniel, what are some of the benefits then of this modular housing model, how can this help as well as be part of this solution to the problem Lewis has just highlighted? Yeah, there are several benefits, let's try to break it down to the biggest ones, speed, the construction is faster due to simultaneous sidewalk and module building and effectively, the cost effectiveness, well used waste and labour cost, the quality I mentioned earlier, it's easier to control the quality in a factory to ensure high standards than the environmental impact, it's more sustainable with less material waste and the ability to include energy efficient features is greater and then my favourite benefit, the flexibility, it's easily customizable to meet specific needs and suitable for various types of buildings and like mentioned earlier, it's basically just like playing LEGO. And we were saying that some of the problems are the government on building affordable housing, which really prices a lot of people out of the market and therefore they can't afford to buy a home so then they have to rent or whatever situation they then buy themselves in. So speaking about affordability then, how affordable are modular homes in comparison to regular bricks and mortar houses? It really helps to compare, it's dependent on the project you have at hand, the scale of it, just like the modular buildings you choose for example, so there's not only one modular manufacturer out there, they're all several and then they're building two different standards or they have different topics they focus on, the one modular build that's really sustainable, whereas the other one is really affordable but it's not like super environmental friendly, so it's coming down to what manufacturing you want for your project, that's a part of what other future homes is doing, so we are there to offer the expertise to our clients and tell them, hey, that might be a good manufacturer for you. And then just comparing modular with traditional, it's not a one to one comparison, modular can serve for example different sites if you have a temporary site for 10 years, modular can serve that site and then move the homes somewhere else, whereas traditional can't do that, so it's hard to compare but at the end, for my experience, so my background is working with a modular manufacturer in Germany, the art cheaper and especially for the running costs, so there are modular schemes for homeless people, which has energy bills of less than five pounds per week and as we look at our energy bill, I'm pretty certain they are higher, so it's hard to compare but in the end, I'm pretty sure that modular homes can be the better solution depending on the project you want to have. And so Alia, future homes then, are you kind of primarily focused on housing the homeless or is that just one of the many strands that you work on? Our focuses are on homelessness. Okay, and then for the benefit of our listeners as well, so your focus is homelessness and helping people to escape the cycle of poverty, which is fantastic, but when we talking about modular homes in general, are modular homes just things to help homeless people or can anybody look at investing in a modular home as an alternative to a normal house? Anyway, I'm going to do that, so modular selves, pretty much all the sectors, whatever is scalable is good for modular, officers, schools, homeless communities or if you think about tiny homes, which is like Eastern Europe right now, a lot of people buy themselves a tiny home and put it somewhere next to the woods, for example, that's modular as well. So modular is just a big world for construction which happens in a factory environment first and then get on side, can be residential homes where you have like two semi-detached houses or an office building with like 500 offices in, so it serves pretty much every sector, but we think that modular is a great solution for these supported homeless communities because it's scalable, it's easy, it's fast, it's cost effective, you can serve many different sides and that's widely formed that we want to work with modular homes for creating these communities. That's great and because it's not a traditional building method really and it's still fairly new in the UK, what are some of the challenges you face when trying to use or set up or even sort of spread the idea of modular housing in the UK and then in the housing sector, what challenges do you face there? I think the biggest challenge right now is the perception of the modular market due to the latest failing of big players like B.T. Pezif or bigger homes and overcoming that stick mind, lack of awareness about the modular homes, for us like a teaching mission that we try to fulfill through our showcase projects and show the people, hey, it's good. If you do it good, it's going to be a good solution for that project but there are other challenges like navigating building codes, regulations, financing, insurance which are not adapted to the modular method yet, I'm hopeful about the future and then simplest things like transporting the homes to the side. If you're, for example, in a really dense city and as mentioned, these homes are already finished so you need to find the right street to get the homes there. So yeah, there are different challenges but the biggest one is just the education for people about the modular market and that it's a great solution. And so where can people educate themselves about modular housing? Listening to their podcast, yeah. That's brilliant. Oh, thank you, Daniel, that's wonderful. Lewis, coming back to you, how did you come to be involved with the ferry project? So my first involvement was I was the first Cambridge recycling officer and that started a bit before Keith, actually, it started 34 years ago but I was aware around the year 2000 of what Keith was doing with the ferry project because he was really strong on reuse and all of the benefits that it gives of creating interesting work for people who are recovering from problems, of recycling furniture to people who really need it. So that was my involvement from about 2000 to about 2010. I was involved on and off in different ways and but meanwhile, Martin Clark, our illustrious boss, had been sort of working with Keith on the potential to have a community. So Martin set up the first one and it was finished in 2020 in Cambridge and was immediate, I think, talking to Keith and along with a woman, the amazing Rebecca Howard who helped the whole project was looking on the lookout for a site. So we worked with Keith, we worked with an outfit, places for people. They had a small piece of land. As Daniel said, there's a lot of advantages of modular and one of them is to make uses of sites like Jubilee Place. So yeah, Alia got its hard hat on, its steel cap boots and got to work helping Keith with new meaning. Another lovely social enterprise based in Waterbeach who make these homes that as Daniel said last at least 60 years and quite a lot of work was put in and six homes and a new community was created and that was open two years ago. And how has the ferry project used modular housing effectively in this Jubilee Place that you've helped them to establish? Well these communities we are passionate about and we're currently working on one of 24 homes in Chelmsford, the most important thing there, Matt, is that there's an underestimated power of people who've got a shared life experience living together. So in addition to the direct support from the ferry project, this community of 25 square meter homes, they're easy for people who've been in difficult times, who may have been in the more like hostel accommodation to call their own. So a nice living area, decent kitchen facilities, shower, washing machine and a quiet bedroom at the back. It gives people the space to recover, so we call them move on accommodation, transitional. They will have already made some progress, maybe at Octavia Place, Octavia House and this is in a way a reward for the fact that they're making progress. So it's a halfway house before then moving on into places of their own and then freeing up a place where somebody else who needs it. And it's also helping them to adapt with those extra skills and things that when you're in the more supported environment, you might have had a lot of help, but now there's less of that support. And I think what happens there is that housing is often the last thing that people lose. They might have, for various reasons, their lives hit the buffers. They may have then suffered addiction problems probably as much after something's gone wrong. So housing is often the last thing they lose. And this is that people rebuild their self-respect. They rebuild relationships with their families, with their friends. They're then in a position just to reboot, but they do need time and space. The homes are actually designed to be part of a community with a veranda that opens out to their neighbours. It is social, but they can shut the door and have peace and quiet and they don't get that if you're in shared accommodation. Oh, thank you, Lewis. How can modular housing help those who are experiencing rural homelessness in particular? Obviously, the focus of our podcast is sort of more specifically on rural homelessness because the ferry project is located in such a rural area. So how can modular housing help people in the rural situation? We'll take whatever sites we can. Often we're looking at larger towns and cities than wizbeach, but it's sometimes forgotten just exactly how difficult the homeless crisis is. They would tend to be better located within an existing settlement rather than outside, although Emmaus do a very good job around the country with rural-based communities. So I think it needs to be a site where people have got a shop nearby. They've got a bus service. They feel part of a community. It's often good if it's part of a church. So that's why we focus on generous churches who've got a spare piece of land. So it's just as big a challenge. And I think we've got a hidden homelessness crisis in rural areas. We've sometimes got councils that don't do as much as they need to. And they often have poor information. So councils are only really obliged to help people who've got children, households with children, and single people get badly neglected. And so rough sleeping is only the edge of a huge iceberg with a lot of people that might be just finding a bed for the night. And the worst part of it is if they end up having to sleep rough, and in winter some of them die because the temperatures just so bad and their living conditions are so appalling that their health deteriorates. So that's why we believe that supported communities have got just as big a part to play in smaller towns right across England and Wales and Scotland. Daniel, have you got anything to add to that? Yeah, a couple of points, Lewis covered most of it very good. But I think there are some benefits which are not only applied to the rural part, but which are just big benefits from people experiencing homelessness everywhere. The biggest one is the rapid deployment. So we can build so much faster than plantational homes. And those people who are sleeping rough every single night, they don't have any time to wait. And so you want to provide them out, move over what I had as soon as possible. And with that quick construction process, you also provide timely housing, which is essential. Same with the affordability I mentioned earlier. Not only is it a cost-effective building method, which makes housing more affordable, but also by building it more sustainable, it reduces the utility cost in the end for the residents and sure, they have some support from the government. But every penny they can save, which is a valuable penny. And also the scalability. So you can scale it for individual or community needs and the adaptability needs. So it's suitable for various rural landscapes and requirements. And we can use sites which others can't build on. So yeah, there are so many benefits to that. Yeah, they really are. And so what are your hopes for the future of modular housing? Daniel, we'll start with you and then we'll come to Lewis. I think my biggest hope is the mainstream acceptance and the recognition of modular housing for its quality and efficiency. And then I'm also looking forward to more supportive policies and more regulations that facilitate modular construction in general. I'm hopeful about the continued innovation and that sector about other construction techniques and materials and also the promotion of the green technologies and energy efficient design. Modular is already very good at that, but there are. I'm pretty sure there will be more innovation, especially in that sector. And of course, the wider use of modular housing to address the housing shortage and get people of this trade as soon as possible. Thank you. Lewis, how about you? What are your hopes for the future? We want to hear from people who might be listening to this and who are prompted to help the ferry project or other homeless charities. Ali Future of Homes feels a gap because there is very little support as Keith Smith knows and the team at Ferry Project know. You're living on a shoestring budget often. So we're looking for sites and we'd be really keen if a site can be found in Whispeech to help the ferry project build its second community. And we're looking for the government to help us because this is a tragedy, the lives that are being damaged. So yeah, we're here to work with people in towns and cities across the country and rural areas away from there if people think there's a need and they can work with an organisation. So we do need a homeless charity that's at the centre who will effectively provide that ongoing support and run the homes that we're very happy to help build. And we just know that there's a gap there, Matt, and it's a tragedy, but it's one that there's practical solutions for. And these smaller homes, particularly for people who are getting used to living on their own and re-establishing lives, really fit the bill. Thanks, Lewis. And for the benefit of our listeners, we will be putting a link to the Ali Future Homes website in our show notes of this episode. So if you want to click over there to find out more about them or get in contact with Lewis or Daniel, you can do that quite easily by just scrolling down to the bottom of this podcast wherever you're listening. And you should find the show notes there and the link to their site. Well, that just leads you to say, Lewis Hobart and Daniel Wren, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Rural Homelessness Podcast. Thank you for joining me. Thank you, Matt. Thank you very much. And thank you as well for listening to this episode. Don't forget that the Rural Homelessness Podcast comes out twice a month on the 1st and the 15th. So we'll be back really soon with another episode where we'll be discussing Rural Homelessness. We look forward to the pleasure of your company, then goodbye. Thank you for listening to the Rural Homelessness Podcast brought to you by The Ferry Project. That's our website on www.fairyproject.org.uk (upbeat music) (gentle music)
