A new chapter for the housing festival

Jessie Hayden, Projects and Policy Lead, Housing Festival

We recently celebrated a significant milestone for the Bristol Housing Festival – our fifth anniversary! We established ourselves as a five-year project, a ‘think and do tank’ aimed at enabling change and innovation in housing. This has been a period of reflection, celebration, and an ongoing commitment to reimagining better ways to live in our cities, in Bristol and beyond!

If you’re reading this, you’ve found our new website and likely noticed our refreshed branding and social media handles.

While we will continue our work in Bristol, the housing crisis is a national challenge, and our efforts now extend to consulting with other local authorities and considering the national picture. In fact, Bristol’s commitment to innovation and its subsequent learning journey have attracted interest across the country. As we address the structural deficit in our housing locally, we gain insights and tools to address it in other cities. ‘Housing Festival’ as an umbrella organisation will allow for this wider reach.

As Bristol is still where the majority of our work happens (and this is unlikely to change), you can view all our Bristol specific content on the Bristol page. We take pride in our accomplishments and draw inspiration from Bristol’s commitment to embracing innovation and having the courage to ‘go first.’ Collaboration is at the heart of the Housing Festival. Our work is made possible by the incredible people who have worked with us and the shared values of those in Bristol and beyond dedicated to reshaping the housing narrative and ending the housing crisis. However, the work is far from done, and we are impatient for more.

Across the UK, we are witnessing a brutal Temporary Accommodation crisis. Nationally, there are 104,000 households living in bed and breakfasts and other temporary accommodations, costing the taxpayer £1.7 billion a year – a 100% increase since 2016. In Bristol, there are 1,300 families in Temporary Accommodation, costing the council around £13 million a year. We are working with Bristol City Council on the solution locally and engaging with several partners to test our emergent thesis on how to address this structural deficit in housing nationally. We believe that tackling this crisis is the crucial first step in addressing the crisis as a whole.

At the heart of what we do is the conviction that ‘home’ is about more than shelter. It is a foundational human need and a source of belonging and security. Over the past five years, we’ve explored the fundamental question – ‘why is it so hard to build the homes we need to overcome the crisis we’re in?’ We know that this is our housing crisis, and we need collective leadership and public buy-in to address it. Whether you’ve just discovered us or been journeying with us for a long time, whether you’re in the political or business space or a member of the wider public, you can be part of advocating for the systemic change that will bring the transformation we so desperately need.

We look forward to continuing the journey with old and new friends.