Final call

Author

Harold Goodwin

If you have not yet completed the survey, please do, and do it now.

The Housing Needs Survey closes at midnight on 13th July. Please be sure to return your survey form to arc4 or fill the survey in online.

This survey really matters to the future of our town and your family’s housing needs. We can make a difference.

There is resentment about the building of so many new houses around Faversham most of them three and four bedrooms and priced out of the reach of many Faversham families. This is our chance to do something about this and to make it easier for children raised in the town to secure a home and bring up their children here too. The extended families, many able to trace their presence in Faversham back for generations, are a big part of what makes Faversham special. Extended families are an important part of our cultural heritage.

We established the Faversham Community Land Trust to build really affordable accommodation for our community. We commissioned the survey because we had to prove that there is real housing need in Faversham. This survey is your opportunity to provide that evidence.  

• We know that there are couples. Some of them already married, living back with their parents while they save for a deposit on a house—many delaying having children into their forties.
• Young people are couch-surfing or feeling trapped living at home with their parents desperate to get a home of their own.
• There are elderly individuals, alone or in couples, who would like to downsize but who cannot find suitable accommodation. 

We hope through the Community Land Trust to be able to create homes of some of these groups.

The Faversham Town Council is developing a Neighbourhood Plan, and we are sharing the survey results with them. We shall be pressing for more really affordable homes, and for them to be built by local builders rather than by the big developers.

Our town needs more starter homes of the sort we have in St John’s, St Mary’s, Park Road and elsewhere. Through the Neighbourhood Plan we can demand this kind of housing and say where it should be. There are three advantages to this approach 

• We create affordable housing for local people
• As they are already resident in the town or nearby, we are not placing more pressure on the schools and local surgeries
• Central government will impose housing targets on Swale, Faversham will have to accept some of them. But through the Neighbourhood Plan, we can schedule less land if the housing density is  greater through terraces and small blocks of flats of the sort we see in Gange Mews, Herbert Dane Court and Park Court.

​If you have not yet completed the survey, please do, and do it now.