'Why I spent £85k of my own money to help fix Britain's housing crisis'

Hastings was such a lively town in the 1980s that London bands would come to play a gig and never go home, says Dr Jess Steele.

Today it is one of the most deprived in England with a housing shortage so severe the council was told last year it might go bankrupt.

She leads a community group which was recently awarded £1.5m by the council to create 12 flats in an abandoned publishing house.

But its efforts to fix the town's housing crisis began in 2014, in a rundown office block next door called Rock House. Jess put in £85,000 of her own money.

Hastings is surrounded by the High Weald, an area of outstanding natural beauty, and situated among cliffs on the Sussex coast. It means town planners have little of the open land typically chosen for large housing developments.

Local people began to fear they were soon going to be priced out of White Rock, a neighbourhood located behind the Hastings seafront, says Jess.

"There was this feeling that gentrification was going to be a problem – and by gentrification I mean the replacement of existing people on lower incomes by people with higher incomes," she says.

At the time about 35% of households in Hastings were living in relative poverty, a significantly higher figure than the average for south-east England.

Rock House, a nine-storey office block, was half empty and rather shabby by the time Jess and her community group, now known as Hastings Commons, rented a small unit there in 2014 for £200 per month.

Out of the blue they were offered the chance to buy the entire building for £400,000, a heavily discounted price, and with it the chance to help a neglected town and its people.

Jess thought by bringing buildings, such as Rock House, into community ownership, they would be able to "cap the rents forever" and give local people somewhere they could afford to live.

Rents would be offered at one third of the median local income and rise only with inflation.

The community group didn't have the cash to buy Rock House but Jess knew of a social enterprise investor who had £235,000 to spend on converting an empty building into affordable flats and offices. She convinced them to try it in Hastings.

"I was so naive at that stage and not very good at negotiating," says Jess. "I was too embarrassed to offer the letting agent half the asking price, as I had been advised, so I offered the £235,000 grant – he immediately said yes!"

With all the grant money used to purchase the building there was nothing left to pay stamp duty – let alone renovate its nine floors.

Jess, who happened to be re-mortgaging her home, made the deal possible by agreeing to put £85,000 into the project.

Work at Rock House began in October 2014 with the help of volunteers and a local builder.

"We had a report saying it was going to cost £1.9m to renovate the whole building," Jess recalls. "So we threw it away and got on with turning the first two floors into workspaces for local businesses that we knew wanted to rent them."

The building was partially reopened a few months later in 2015 and a third floor was given to an art school to use for a year at no charge.

"They started bringing the building to life and, you know, being ambassadors for it. So more and more people were coming to see it and proposing ideas about how to use the empty space," says Jess. "It was almost like free marketing but they were also shaping the future of it."

The next step was to turn two floors into six flats, using a loan from the founders of the Big Issue, that would be rented out at the affordable rate.

Jess credits the builder, Chris Dodwell, for having the skill and patience to work with the building as it was because the community group couldn't afford an architect.

In March 2016 the first residential tenants moved in and the group was awarded more grants to finish converting the remaining floors into various workspaces, commercial units and common areas. The renovation was completely finished in 2019.

"Housing is really important but people need more than just a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen," says Jess. "They need space to meet, space to work, space for leisure, space for action.

"It is so important that we build homes… And we do that with a neighbourhood focus, rather than just housing units."

One of the beneficiaries is Sue Fellows. The 69-year-old moved to Hastings to be nearer her daughter but found herself struggling to afford renting privately after she retired from work as a carer.

The grandmother-of-10 has been a Hastings Commons tenant for five years and volunteers in their support group for young mums.

"It's a really positive experience," she tells us. "It's a good social life here and it was really important after Covid - when it all felt a bit horrible."

The housing crisis goes beyond Hastings and is a nationwide problem. The government have committed to "delivering the biggest increase in affordable housebuilding in a generation".

Lisa Tye, a property lawyer who helped write a report for the Radix Housing Commission on how to meet building targets, thinks projects like those by Hastings Commons cannot solve the crisis entirely but are part of the solution.

Big housebuilding firms are better able to deliver large numbers of housing units, she says, but community groups can make a difference in places without much available land – and if there are enough of them.

"When you start to add it up, it can provide something that's a bit different and is genuinely community-led."

The money to install affordable flats at the Observer Building was granted to Hastings Commons by the council in October.

The building was home to a printing company that used to employ hundreds of local people until it closed in the 1980s – the terracotta-glazed facade a familiar sight to residents since its construction 100 years ago.

The funding is for 12 affordable homes, 8 of which will be used by the council to house families currently in temporary accommodation.

Jess describes how when she first toured the building, it's seven floors were infested with pigeons and had streams of rainwater running through them – the "rotting heart" of White Rock.

She explains Hastings Commons took ownership of the building in 2019 and have already installed workspaces, an events venue, a technology hub and a Crossfit gym.

It was purchased using a mortgage on Rock House – then valued at £1.6 million.

"Like idiots, we decided to risk all of our good work to buy the derelict wreck next door!" She adds: "But that's our mission, to bring difficult and derelict buildings back into community use."