Cornwall Council has agreed to sell Grade II listed flats worth £640,000 for £1 to ensure affordable homes stay in a Cornish town centre.
The council’s cabinet approved a recommendation to release the 11 Coastguard Flats in Looe to a community land trust to avoid costly maintenance.
Three Seas Community Land Trust offered to carry out a £1m refurbishment through grant funding.
Councillors said the deal meant it would remain as affordable housing.
Second home ownership and holiday lets are blamed for a shortage of affordable housing in the county.
Councillor David Harris, Cornwall Council’s deputy leader, said: “This will retain much-needed affordable housing provision in Looe.”
He said an open market sale would likely have resulted in “the loss of affordable housing provision in Looe”, impacting negatively on the housing service by “increasing demand for temporary accommodation”.
He added: “A community-led redevelopment scheme would ensure the flats would still be used for affordable housing provision.”
Refurbishment of the North Road building was deemed “financially unviable” by Cornwall Housing in 2021.
The building was declared surplus to the council’s needs.
With support from Looe councillors Edwina Hannaford and Armand Toms, Three Seas Community Land Trust stepped in with an offer to carry out a full refurbishment of the properties at a cost of over £1m, to be achieved by grant funding.
The cabinet meeting heard the project would be hard to achieve without grant funding, which is available from Homes England, which supports the project.
Councillor Hannaford said: “Providing secure affordable housing is incredibly important for the people of Looe. The lack of affordable housing in Looe is a real emergency, replicated across Cornwall.”
It may be recalled that in April, Cornwall Council had also announced that three housing schemes in Penryn are to provide 22 new affordable homes for people at risk of homelessness.
The first on New Street, featuring four new-build flats, will see tenants move in “shortly”, Cornwall Council said.
A second project involves Stoke House being converted into six flats, with the third to feature six modular house being built on Commercial Road.
Currently, more than 700 households are in temporary or emergency accommodation in Cornwall, the authority said.
Authorities said the number of people registering for council housing and affordable homes in Cornwall has more than doubled in two years.
Last year, in response to the Cornwall housing crisis, Cornwall Council said in March 2020 there were about 9,000 households on its Homechoice Register but the figure was 21,200 by January 2022.
Rents had also risen sharply as the supply of rented housing has reduced.
Approaches to the council from those given eviction notices jumped 89% from 1,143 in 2019 to 2,156 in 2021.
Figures for May 2022 showed there were 22,423 households registered on Homechoice then.
Some say landlords had decided to stop renting out their properties and were instead using them as holiday lets, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) said.
The average asking price for rents in Cornwall in March 2022 was £1,048 per month, a 26% increase on the average level in 2019 which was £831.
