£3m funding provided for brownfield regeneration in Manchester

Manchester will receive more than £3m to support housing projects across the city bringing long-term brownfield land back into use.

The funding will help build 210 homes in total 119 of which will be affordable housing – at sites across north and east Manchester and one site in the city centre.

81 of the affordable homes are part of the Council’s Project 500 initiative that works in partnership with the city’s registered housing providers to make available smaller, harder to develop pockets of land to increase the number of affordable homes available in the city. Initially Project 500 looks to build 500 affordable homes in partnership with housing providers in the city, with the ambition to exceed that number in the coming years.

All of the Project 500 homes will be capped at the Manchester Living Rent. This is a level of rent capped at the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rate and ensures that these homes will be affordable to as many people as possible, including those in receipt of housing benefit.

The final site is the first development brought forward at Rodney Street in Ancoats by This City – the Council’s wholly owned housing development company. The city centre site will deliver 38 affordable homes capped at the Manchester Living Rent, improving access to affordable homes in the city centre.

The Rodney Street site will deliver a total of 129 homes with 91 market homes subsidising the cost of the affordable homes at the site.

These new homes are part of the ambitious target set in Council’s Housing Strategy up to 2032, which includes the target to help build 36,000 new homes across the city. 10,000 of these new homes will be affordable and 3,000 of those will be located in the city centre.

Nationally, £180m has been made available to Councils up to 2025 to develop under-used Council-owned land for housing and part of the Brownfield Land Release Fund Round 2 – administered by the Government’s One Public Estate (OPE) programme.

Cllr Gavin White, Manchester City Council’s executive member for housing and development, said “Post-industrial Manchester left a lot of unused, brownfield land across the city with the largest swathes across north and east Manchester.

“Developing this land and bringing it back into use is an important part of our plans to deliver 36,000 new homes in the next ten years and we have an ambitious target to make sure 10,000 of these are genuinely affordable to Manchester people.”

“However, brownfield land is often more challenging to develop, and we also have lots of smaller plots that are financially difficult to build on. This funding will support our partnership with the city’s registered providers to build on these smaller plots of land as part of our Project 500 initiative – delivering the affordable homes our residents need.”

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily

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