New models to stop the housing and climate crises - Part 2

Laudes supports organisations working with the idea of ‘housing as a human right’.

At the 2023 International Social Housing Festival (ISHF) Laudes partners Marianna Mazzucato (UCL IIPP) and Leilani Farha (The Shift) launched their new joint paper presenting a mission-oriented approach to achieving human rights-based housing, which positions IIPP’s mission approach as the vehicle which can drive forward national and city action on housing.

Meanwhile, Habitat for Humanity also presented their methodology for industry collaboration to turn empty buildings into homes, which they believe could provide 19,000 much-needed affordable homes within just a few years.

At Laudes, we’ve begun the process of mapping out the ecosystem of solutions – together with Dark Matter Labs – developing a map of actors and thinking carefully about how our funding can bring housing rights and climate solutions together so they are inextricably linked in the minds of investors, politicians, and planners. This map includes collectives and networks mainstreaming fairer, resident-led housing models; and those who are helping them to scale.

For example, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) provide a permanently affordable, sustainable, community-led solution with the potential to deliver at least 278,000 homes across England and Wales alone. With over 350 CLTs existing across Europe the moment was ripe for the launch of the European Community Land Trust Network, supported by Laudes, at ISHF.

City representatives speaking at the ISHF conference regularly cited community-led and collaborative forms of housing as a solution in efforts to provide permanent housing for the communities in need. Emily Marion Clancy, Deputy Mayor of Bologna, spoke of the initiative between three cities in Italy – Bologna, Milan and Naples – that will put community-led housing at the heart of the support and financing mechanisms offered by local governments.

Thankfully industry is starting to move on social value too, developing their own social value frameworks and investing in resident engagement tools to understand the aspirations and concerns of their local communities in places where change is anticipated or planned, enabling them to create places that respond better to these needs, with greater support. 

We need all hands on deck to help industry define what doing good looks like in the context of housing – which is both a human right and the world’s most valuable asset class.

With social value frameworks being launched by a host of leading developers, and the TIFD x TFSD process to define what social value means for investors, the time is right to align across industry. Laudes’ built team is beginning to scope what a process of industry alignment on social value could look like – learning from our experience gaining alignment on climate goals.

As the City of Oslo’s housing minister Herman Søndenaa asks: ‘what would a Paris Agreement on social value look like?’