Local housing association Flourish Homes is bucking the depressing house building trend with the construction of six new family homes in Wells.
Work is well under way at a site in Churchill Road East which should see six families moving into the three-bedroomed homes in early September, after 26 garages were pulled down to make way for the houses.
The Aster Group team, which delivers Flourish Homes’s development plans, has had to be creative in finding sites to deliver the housing association’s targets to build new homes to rent. With the credit crunch hitting large housing developments, the Aster Group and Flourish Homes are looking at a variety of ways to make sure affordable rented homes continue to be built in the Mendip area.
One way is to look at areas of land owned by Flourish Homes, like sites which just have garages on them, to see if there is a better way of using that land to provide affordable homes for people to rent. The housing association has also recently announced a multi-million pound redevelopment plan in Frome, which will see 54 of its homes demolished in the Singers Knoll area of the town and the land used to build more than 100 new rented homes and an extra care scheme.
“The credit crunch has hit some of our plans to deliver new affordable rented homes in Mendip, at a time when the need for these homes has never been greater,” said Flourish Homes’s Managing Director Alan Brunt.
“The plans for large housing estates, which deliver portions of affordable housing as part of the scheme, are being mothballed. So the Aster Group is helping us look at the land we own to see if we can use it in a better way. It’s some time since Flourish Homes has been in a position to build new homes but the Aster Group has been working hard on our behalf getting schemes ready to go. And it looks as if their hard work is paying off because the Homes and Communities Agency, which funds the building of new affordable homes, is looking very favourably on our schemes, such as this one in Wells.”
The homes are being built by Clevedon-based Russell Construction which started on site in mid-January. The homes are built using a timber frame, which speeds up construction while still giving excellent thermal and sound insulation. The total cost of the scheme is £600,000, half of which has come from the Homes and Communities Agency through New Futures, the Aster Group-led partnership of south-west based housing associations. The homes will be rented through Homefinder Somerset, the new way that social housing in the county is allocated to those in housing need.
