How selling homes for £1 can save our streets from squalor

The success of a similar scheme in Liverpool, where 20 run-down terrace houses have been sold off for £1.

Jayalal Madde, 49, paid £1 for a derelict red-brick Victorian terrace house

He spent £35,000 on renovations and believes it is now worth £150,000

The taxi driver is planning to move in before Christmas with his family

He installed new wiring, plumbing, windows and flooring to reach standard

Taxi driver Jayalal Madde, 49, who bought a boarded-up Victorian house in Toxteth and hopes to move in with his family before Christmas, said the gamble has paid dividends.

Jayalal Madde outside his £1 Toxteth home which he hopes to move into with his wife Chami and their two daughters before Christmas; he has spent less than £40,000 doing up the four-bedroom home

‘I have spent less than £40,000, plus my initial £1, and have this amazing four-bedroom home,’ he beamed.

He converted the home from two flats and installed new wiring, plumbing, windows and flooring

He said that once the other homes in the area were done up, it would be a ‘brand-new, regenerated community’.

‘I have spent less than £40,000 plus one pound and we have this amazing family home. The girls can’t wait to move in,’ he told Liverpool Confidential website.

‘Around the corner some smaller two-bedroomed homes were renovated and sold for just under £100,000. On that basis our house will be worth at least £150,000.’

The taxi driver spent around £35,000 on renovating the home and now believes it is worth £150,000

The property had been empty for 20 years and it had been on the council's list to be demolished for 15 years

The property had been empty for around 20 years, having previously been converted into flats before the residents left and nobody wanted to move in.

After becoming one of the lucky applicants among 1,000 would-be buyers, Mr Madde, who moved to Liverpool from his native Sri Lanka eight years ago, had said: ‘It has always been our dream to own our own home. 

'I’ve been saving up for years, and trying to get loans and a mortgage.’

The home was bought last year under a Liverpool council scheme to sell off 20 derelict properties

Refurbishment work began in May, and while flooring and furniture still need to be moved in, all the necessary structural changes are now complete. 

Mr Madde is currently living in rented accommodation nearby with his wife and their daughters Sansali, 13, and Simali, 11.

Spared mortgage repayments, they have been able to plough more than £30,000 into transforming the four-bedroom Toxteth house, including a stylish, modern kitchen with giant American-style fridge and a designer bathroom.

Mr Madde, 49, said yesterday: ‘I love the house because it’s a big, double-fronted terrace. I’m trying to move in before Christmas. There’s work still to do but I hope it won’t take long.’

Behind the £1 giveaway there lies a well-considered social theory. It is that by renovating a sprinkling of houses in a rundown area and filling them with the ‘right’ sort of people — locals committed to building an orderly neighbourhood — there will be a knock-on effect with all the other residents raising their standards.

‘We want to change the entire culture of the area, and it’s far more likely to happen by bringing in owner-occupiers who put their stamp down and won’t tolerate bad behaviour,’ says Cobridge project manager Zainul Pirmohamed, a housing officer who came up with the £1-a-house idea after hearing about a scheme in Rotterdam, Holland.

‘This won’t be achieved overnight — it is a five to ten-year plan — but already we are seeing signs that it is beginning to have an effect.’

And it certainly is, as I saw during an uplifting week in Stoke — a city brought to its knees during the 1980s, when cheap Far Eastern pottery and changing global markets closed dozens of firms. Now, against all the odds, Stoke is fast-rising again.

While there will never be a return to the days when 70,000 men and women marched to work in protective bonnets and overalls, in many ways the wheel has turned full circle. Around the world, pottery embossed with the Stoke-on-Trent stamp is suddenly fashionable again.

Leading the way are companies such as Portmeirion, owner of the Spode and Royal Worcester brands, which has found new markets in the least likely places. In South Korea, for example, where it sells £14 million of pottery a year, its Botanical Garden design is a must-have status symbol.

As civic leaders have clamoured to point out, Stoke is now the nation’s third fastest-growing area, with a growth rate of 13.5 pc — almost six times the national average — and the number claiming jobseekers’ allowance is down 38.6 pc on last year.

All this is good news: proof that there is still plenty of life left in the industrial towns of the Midlands and North.

Kate, 23, and Aidan Walker, 24, pose by their Christmas tree at their £1 home in Colbridge, Stoke-on-Trent

But, of course, if people are to keep filling the vacancies in Stoke’s factories, they will need decent places to live; and the fact is that there are still 1,682 on its housing waiting list, even though, for a variety of reasons, 4,500 properties in Stoke lie empty.

Which brings us back to ‘Poundland’.

Even the most nostalgic pottery worker wouldn’t pretend its old houses were ever luxurious. They were draughty, with outside toilets, no running hot water and free-standing bath tubs.

But older residents remember the camaraderie that existed in the gridiron streets 40 years ago.

‘It was a lovely area to live in,’ says Vera Davies, who transferred patterns to the plates in a local pot-bank. ‘There was a great community spirit.’

Everything changed when the factories closed. The houses were acquired cheaply by landlords from faraway towns who cared little for their upkeep and filled them with the lowliest of tenants.

Then, compounding the problem, we had Labour deputy prime minister John Prescott’s ill-conceived Housing Market Renewal Pathfinders’ Programme, which saw grants for councils to buy huge swathes of Victorian housing stock.

They would then either be renovated at taxpayers’ expense and sold at market price — if, of course, buyers could be found; or they would have to be demolished to make way for more marketable new-builds.

Kate and Aidan pose in one of their rooms, shortly before they moved into the house and did it up

The problem with this plan is that individual terrace houses cannot be knocked down without weakening the structure of others, so whole rows have to go. This would have cost millions and taken many years, during which the areas would have become ever more rundown.

When the Labour government fell, councils which had acquired these houses were left in a mess after the Coalition abruptly scrapped the policy and withdrew the funds.

So what to do with these unwanted houses? Like many local authorities, Stoke began by boarding up the houses it had acquired in and around Portland Street, along with the corner shop and pub. Inevitably, this only hastened the decline.

Scouring the pavement outside her terrace home in Denbigh Street with a brush and soapy water, like some proud Potteries housewife from a bygone era, Joanne Washington, a young mother-of-two, recalled what it was like to live there a couple of years ago.

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LIVERPOOL'S £1 HOUSING SCHEME

In total nearly 200 derelict properties in Liverpool are being brought back into use under a huge regeneration scheme.

Taxi driver Jayalal Madde was the first to buy one of 20 run-down terrace houses offered for sale for a pound.

To deter speculators and landlords, they were sold on condition that the purchaser was a local first-time buyer and had a job, would spend tens of thousands of pounds on refurbishing it, and promised to live there for at least five years.

Mr Madde has also become the first person to finish refurbishing one of the homes and hopes to move in before Christmas with his wife and two children. 

His property had been empty for around 20 years, having previously been converted into flats before the residents left and nobody wanted to move in.

Liverpool council’s remaining £1 homes have all now found buyers and renovation work will begin in the coming months.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2872128/How-selling-homes-1-save-streets-squalor-Crazy-No-inspiring-report-Potteries-shows-breathe-new-life-Britain.html