Forest City · Affordability
How much will a Forest City home cost?
A four-bed family home in Forest City is expected to sell for under £350,000, a three-bed for around £230,000 and a two-bed for around £180,000 — versus £494,000 for a terraced house in Cambridge, 22 minutes away by rail. Cheap land, city-scale building and a Community Land Trust keep prices low permanently, with no subsidy.
These are not small homes. The four-bed is 1,720 square feet over three storeys with a private garden, far larger than a typical British new build. The prices are possible because the land is bought at close to farmland prices — secured through voluntary options before city status inflates its value — and because building at city scale drives the cost per square foot down to a fraction of what South East developers pay.
Buyers own their home; the Community Land Trust owns the land beneath it. Because homes can only be sold back to the city, the discount can't be flipped for profit — it's passed on, permanently, to the next generation. Around 30% of homes will be for rent, so the city works for people at every stage of life.
Claims of a "£110 billion black hole" count a private developer’s markup as a public cost. Remove the expensive land and that markup disappears — nobody pays for something that no longer exists. On current costings, housing sales alone still return around £13 billion of surplus.
The design of the £350k home is set out on our Homes page.