Some thoughts from an interesting morning at the 'Liveable City' - housing seminar in Glasgow last week which was organised by the Royal Danish Embassy and partners, in conjunction with the Festival of Architecture 2016.

Housing Challenge

We often hear reference to not just a housing challenge, but an actual crisis! There are many aspects to this including the following, which came up at the seminar and we hear time and again:-

• Affordable housing. The challenge of gaining access to a good standard of affordable housing is a major problem for tens of thousands of people of all age groups.

• Poor quality of construction. Despite ever more demanding Building Standards the quality of much new construction falls well below what it should be and often provides poor value for money (particularly the offerings from volume house builders).

• Desire to self-build. Thousands of people would love to be involved in building their own home, but are faced with the huge difficulty of accessing suitable land.

Housing Opportunity!

So, rather shamelessly, here’s what we at dma think we can do in our small way to address some of these challenges!

• Affordability

We’re initiating small scale (2-30 unit) housing projects in rural and urban locations which reduce or eliminate avoidable costs. Here’s how we can do it:

+ Eliminate developer profit

+ Ensure space-efficient design

+ Tightly control purchasing and procurement

(our principle of best quality at lowest price)

+ Ensure the highest quality build; minimise waste; eliminate defects

• Quality The above approach deals with the quality challenge!

• Desire to self-build The big challenge is finding land. We have access to numerous sites in the NE and want to pull together groups of people with a desire to build their own home.

Join one of our groups and sign up for a plot. When we achieve a full quota of group members we’ll purchase the site, work with you to design your dream home, get all the performance and cost calculations done, deal with all the approvals, ground conditions, utility supplies, etc. and hold your hand through the whole process to completion and during the whole settling in period.

Interested? Get in touch if you want to know more about locations, timescales, costs and process. We can sit down for a coffee and a chat to go through this and explain the options in more detail.