Jewish housing association to offer new-build Edgware flats
From helping East End Jews living in slum conditions in the 19th century to 1500 properties today across London and Canvey Island, IDS has offered a helping hand for 140 years
A housing association with a deep Jewish heritage has said it will soon be making dozens of newly built residential units available to Jews in Edgware – either to rent or buy on a shared ownership basis, writes Stephen Oryszczuk.
IDS, which manages 1,500 properties in Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Southwark, Redbridge, Haringey, Camden, Barnet, Hertsmere, and Canvey Island, said it hoped to help those struggling to get on the property ladder during the cost-of-living crisis.
Board member Alan Jacobs said IDS was tackling the shifting locus of the Jewish community, having moved north and west from the East End areas populated when the organisation started, in 1885.
Places like Haringey, Stoke Newington, Stepney Green are “where Jews lived back then”, says Jacobs. The buildings that IDS’s forerunner built – and that IDS still runs – were believed to constitute “the greatest of all available means for improving the physical, moral and social conditions of the Jewish poor”.
Today, residents on IDS estates in these areas are “nearly all non-Jewish”, says Jacobs, because when a home becomes available, the local council “gives you whoever’s at the top of their list – and that list is representative of multicultural London, which is so wonderfully diverse”.
Some IDS buildings are well known to London’s Jews, with assisted living homes at AJEX House in Stamford Hill and Charlotte Court in Ilford. Hilary Dennis Court in Wanstead is owned by IDS and run by Jewish Blind & Disabled for tenants aged 60 and over.
Likewise, Jewish charities are no strangers to IDS’s non-Jewish tenants. During Covid, for instance, Jami provided mental health support, while a Jewish Care programme gave tenant volunteers digital skills for lockdown. Other IDS partner organisations include Jewish Women’s Aid (JWA) and Kisharon, the Jewish learning disabilities charity.
“We make it known through synagogues and Jewish charities when homes in these buildings come up,” says Jacobs. “The rents are capped. They tick lots of boxes, especially with Jewish communities around them.”
Other Jewish housing associations, such as Agudas, focus mainly on the needs of the Charedi community, but IDS paints with a broader Jewish brush, so it can be better placed to accommodate secular Jews.
A few years ago the Institute for Jewish Policy Research published a report, funded by IDS, on affordable housing for Britain’s Jews. IDS says this informed its investment priorities. “It identified that [geographical] cone going up from Hendon and Golders Green, through Mill Hill, then Edgware and Borehamwood, out that way, where the two principal local authorities are Barnet and Hertsmere,” says Jacobs.
“We’re in conversation with them, [asking] can we invest – where we do have surplus capital – in new buildings, buying affordable homes, and where we work with the local authority to prioritise not just whoever’s top of their list, but actually prioritise Jewish people who are on their lists, and people who work in the Jewish community.”
New IDS schemes have been identified in Edgware and Borehamwood “where our communities thrive, but where some are excluded because of high costs of renting or buying, as target areas for growth”, says IDS.
Residents buy an initial share of the property, typically somewhere between 25-75 percent, then pay an affordable rent on the balance. So, at 25 percent, they would need a quarter of the deposit.
“Over time, as you can afford it, you can buy a bigger share from IDS, and ultimately own the property outright,” says Jacobs.
“If you sell before then, you keep your share and benefit from of any change in value.”
It works whichever way the economic wind is blowing, he says. “In a rising market it’s a chance to get yourself on the property ladder, in a falling market it reduces your risk. And in us, you get a partner who’s been around for 140 years on your side. It’s an attractive proposition.
“We’re trying to provide access to the housing market for those who cannot raise the full deposit in those areas. There’s plenty of young Jewish couples and families who want to own. This will help.”
More developments are coming, with Mill Hill and Dollis Hill mentioned. “We’re also in talks with a couple of Jewish charities about doing things jointly with them,” says Jacobs. “It’s our mission to build new homes for the Jewish community in the broadest sense.”
Watch this space.
140 years of Jewish heritage
By the middle of the 19th century, pogroms and massacres in Europe and Russia had sent Jews fleeing for the safety of England, in particular London, with many of these new Ashkenazi immigrants settling in the East End, alongside Irish families and Protestant Huguenot silk weavers.
In 1859, the Jewish Board of Guardians was founded to tackle the problems they faced and provide for these impoverished incomers through the Jewish community’s own charitable funds. A report commissioned by the United Synagogue on the East End’s “spiritual destitution” recommended that they be better integrated into the British way of life, and that they be provided with decent, healthy homes.
A sense of urgency was added in 1884, when the Board’s own Sanitary Commission reported that the slum crisis of East End Jews was beyond control. “Houses occupied by the Jewish poor are for the most part barely fit, and for the many utterly unfit for human habitation,” it said.
Up stepped a group of Jewish philanthropists, the machers of the 19th century. Chief among them was Nathaniel Mayer Rothschild, scion of the banking dynasty. Now a lord, he wanted to provide decent, affordable housing to the Jews of Spitalfields and Whitechapel, so created a model dwellings company. Investors were promised an annual dividend of four percent from the 1,600 shares of £25 each, and rents were fixed at no more than five shillings a week, giving birth to the ‘Four Percent Industrial Dwellings Society’ in 1885 – and it worked.
By 1899, it housed around 4,000 mostly Jewish families in its tenements, where death rates were barely a third of the national average. Fast forward almost 140 years and a name change, the IDS still provides accommodation at fair rents to those most in need, in keeping with its Jewish ethos.
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