The practice of community groups taking loan of properties is neither new, nor that complicated
Empty housing can be reclaimed by community groups. All you have to do is ask. Photograph: Don McPhee
When I tell people it's possible to ask property owners to loan them empty houses so they can be returned to use, most look at me with a mixture of shock and excitement. They ask: "Doesn't that drive down property prices, and why don't owners put the houses up for rent?" They all ask: "How do you do it?"
The practice of community groups taking loan of properties that would otherwise be disused or empty for a fixed period and returning them to use isn't new, nor that complicated. It's called self-help housing.
The orthodoxy that property and land will always increase in value has crumbled. If there is no profit, there is no development, and properties lie empty with no one to buy or rent them. The Empty Homes Agency estimated that in 2008 there were 943,000 empty homes across the UK, at a time when government statistics indicated one in 12 people in the UK were on social housing waiting lists.
Empty properties damage communities, giving out a signal that a neighbourhood is failing. They attract more antisocial behaviour the longer they stay empty, and are more likely to end up completely unusable.
Whether for political or economic reasons, many owners - such as local get people into authorities - sit paralysed, while the indirect knock-on community costs of these empty properties grow. Market value is often considered more important than "use value".
Self- help housing is all about use value. It's grassroots, gritty and exciting. It generates opportunities for hands-on training and is community-based. It is local people solving local problems.
Self-help-housing.org is already in touch with successful initiatives across the country. Organisations such as Community Campus in Middlesbrough and Latch and Canopy in Leeds are doing brilliant work getting houses into use and helping young people in need of training and accommodation.
Self-help housing enables people to be active citizens, and it fights the culture of "someone should do something about that". It was once more common, but over the last two decades community development and regeneration has fallen into the hands of professionals preoccupied with management and measurement.
Self-help housing projects struggle to make ends meet, and it's a scandal they get little or no help from large and well-resourced housing associations. Many associations started as small initiatives set up by concerned local people. They have forgotten their roots.
Our website includes guides to finding property, making agreements, organising volunteers and getting funding. It has the first directory of active self-help housing projects, sample policies, contracts and agreements. It's revolutionary that all this information is appearing in one place for the first time. We're showing people how and why they can take back property into the community.
Self-help-housing.org is pushing self-help housing above the radar to secure much-needed support and funding and to inspire more people to do it. Community Campus's Carl Ditchburn recently told me: "We specialise in making silk purses out of sows' ears, and with the right support there's scope for many more projects to do the same."
To make a real impact in our communities, all it takes is a group of people and a property owner to use their imaginations and take those first steps.
• Jon Fitzmaurice is project director of self-help-housing.org. If you have an innovative housing scheme, why not enter the Guardian's Public Services Awards at guardian.co.uk/publicservicesawards
