Housing

Overview 

TSRC is conducting research on a number of dimensions of third sector housing, including: 

• housing associations
• mutual and cooperative housing
• homelessness advice and support
• the tenants’ and community movement
• self-help housing organisations
• social enterprises working in the homelessness field

We also work with a number of other organisations to inform housing policy and practice:

• A partnership project with HACT will inform their work in neighbourhoods and communities - see 'Releasing the Community Investment potential of social housing organisations'.
• We have worked with National Housing Federation and HACT on assessing the impact of community investment by housing associations. This work informed the National Housing Federation Audit and provided a survey report for HACT to understand how housing organisations are measuring their impact.
• Previous work with HACT has explored community investment and community empowerment.
• We have worked with the Building and Social Housing Foundation, Crisis and self-help-housing.org to explore the self help housing model and its potential impact in communities. 

Initial scoping papers

These scoping papers provide an overview of the role played by third sector organisations with regard to housing in each of the sub-sectors above. They explore what third sector housing is becoming, the implications of and for policy, and set an agenda for further research.

While these sub-sectors are to some extent overlapping, each presents a distinctive set of issues. They may be regarded as windows through which the diversity of the third sector can be seen. The papers explore:

• the historical development of the sub-sectors
• the numbers and types of organisations and typical activities
• the definitions used to define the sub-fields, and to establish boundaries with related fields
• the understandings of key actors within these fields
• the extent to which there is a common sense of ‘third sector identity’, and the components of this identity
• the existence of umbrella organisations and ‘field leaders’, and their external dependencies.

Read an overview of the Briefing paper 10 (PDF, 145KB) scoping papers.

Research contact:

• David Mullins