Who owns Forest City? You do.

The idea Britain forgot

There's a word for a city that owns and runs its own basic economic fabric: municipalism.

It isn't a new idea. It's the idea that built Victorian Britain. Birmingham under Joseph Chamberlain bought its gas and water companies and used the profits to clear slums and build the city. Manchester built its own ship canal. Glasgow ran its own trams, telephones, and power. London's boroughs supplied housing, electricity, and even healthcare — before the NHS existed.

These cities didn't wait for Westminster and they didn't leave the basics of life to the market. They planned what they needed, built it, owned it, and used the revenue to keep life cheap for ordinary people. That settlement made them the most dynamic cities on Earth.

Traces of it survive. The City of London's ancient commercial estate still funds Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest. Bournville is still affordable and still beautiful a century on. Letchworth Garden City is still run by a civic trust for its residents. Milton Keynes was built by a development corporation working for the people who would live there.

Everywhere the model survived, it worked. We stopped building new examples. Forest City is the next one.

Not privatisation. Not nationalisation. Something better.

Britain's argument about ownership has been stuck for eighty years between two bad options.

Privatisation hands the basics of life — housing, energy, water, transport — to distant shareholders, and every spare pound of your income ends up as someone else's dividend. Nationalisation buys back ageing assets at great public expense and runs them from Westminster, ending up with the same tired infrastructure under a different logo.

Municipalism is neither. The city builds new infrastructure — a new reservoir, new power, new rail, new commercial districts — and owns it locally, on behalf of the people who live there. No buying back the old. No selling off the new. The assets are created for residents and stay with residents.

Under the default model for new development in Britain, the public grants permission, taxpayers fund the infrastructure, developers sell the homes — and the enormous uplift in land value is banked by private interests. At Forest City, that uplift is the whole point. We keep it, and we spend it on you.

How it works at Forest City

Your home. Around 70% of homes are sold through a Community Land Trust. You own your home outright — mortgageable, warranty-backed, yours. The land beneath it stays with the community forever, which is what keeps a four-bed family home at £350,000 instead of £1 million. When you sell, you sell back to the Trust at a set price: the longer you've lived there, the more of the uplift you keep, and the city keeps a share too. No speculation, no flipping, no bidding wars against buy-to-let landlords. See how the £350,000 home works.

Your rent. The other 30% of homes are cooperative rentals, owned and governed by the people who live in them. Rent covers cost, not a landlord's pension.

The commercial estate. 8,000 acres of commercial space — including a new business district for the firms Cambridge and London have run out of room for — is leased, never sold. Those rents fund the city's services in perpetuity, the way the City of London's estate has for centuries.

The infrastructure. The reservoir, the power, the trams and trains: built new by the city, owned by the city, leased and operated for residents. Revenue goes to services today and new infrastructure for the residents of tomorrow.

What it means for your life

Put it together and the household economics of Forest City look nothing like the rest of Britain.

Commercial rents and infrastructure leases fund services, so local taxes stay low. Housing is permanently affordable, so disposable income rises — dramatically. And when the basics of life are cheap, everything else becomes possible: raising children, saving, starting the business you'd never risk starting in London, where every spare pound is funnelled into someone else's asset.

That's the real product of Forest City. Not houses. Headroom.

The honest caveats

We believe in answering hard questions, so here are the ones we ask ourselves.

Hasn't municipal ownership failed before? Municipal enterprises have failed where they were badly governed or starved of investment. The failures are real and we've studied them. Our answer is governance designed from day one — an independent trust structure, published accounts, and professional operation, not a committee running a utility.

Isn't this just a company owning a town? No. The assets are held in trust for residents, with resident representation in governance. The test is simple: where does the surplus go? At Forest City, it goes to services, infrastructure, and keeping homes affordable — not to external shareholders.

Why should anyone believe the numbers? The infrastructure costs around £45 billion and the commercial estate pays for it. We've published the model and we'll keep publishing as it develops.