The "60% Below Market" Affordability Claim

What is claimed

The developers claim homes would be 60% below market rates. They give examples such as four-bedroom family houses for £350,000, presented to neighbours and in FAQ material. The mechanism they describe is the combination of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and Community Land Trust (CLT): the SEZ attracts employers and generates revenue; the CLT keeps land in community ownership so that housing can be sold at below-market prices with resale restrictions that keep it affordable in perpetuity.

What a Community Land Trust (CLT) is

A Community Land Trust is a democratic non-profit organisation that owns and develops land for community benefit. The National CLT Network and House of Commons Library describe CLTs as enabling "affordable in perpetuity" housing because the trust retains land ownership and typically caps resale prices. This model has been used successfully at smaller scales in the UK.

Forest City 1 proposes to scale this dramatically: hundreds of thousands of homes under a single CLT structure, cross-subsidised by SEZ economics. The developer has not published detailed financial modelling or evidence of lender and investor commitments.

Open questions

We catalogue; we do not attempt to prove or disprove. Open questions include:

• Resale restrictions: How would resale caps work at this scale? What happens in a market downturn?
• Mortgageability: Will mainstream lenders offer mortgages on CLT homes in a large, untested market?
• Cross-subsidy transparency: How much revenue would the SEZ need to generate to sustain affordability? What if employer uptake is slower than projected?
• Underwriting: Who bears the risk if the model does not deliver as promised?

Housing economist Ian Mulheirn has argued that England had a surplus of around 1.12 million dwellings in 2018, and the 2021 census showed 1.5 million more dwellings than households. Affordability is driven more by credit, speculation, and tax than by simple supply. That context informs debate about whether a new city is the right solution.