What This Is All For
SAGE
Small homes, a whole community, and a front door that is hers.
The Goal
Homes Built On Purpose,
For Women Who Need One.
SAGE is a community of small-footprint homes — whole streets rather than scattered houses, safe and secure, built for women over 50 and for women leaving a home that was never safe.
Why A Whole Street Rather Than A Scattered House
A house on its own is shelter. A street of them is a life.
What a community gives backNeighbours who know your name inside a week. Somebody two doors down who holds a spare key, notices when your light stays off, and comes to knock. A woman who moves into a SAGE street arrives among people rather than among boxes.
Small-footprint rather than tinyPaige’s distinction, and it matters. A tiny home is an exercise in doing with less. A small-footprint home is a proper home built at a sensible size — a real kitchen, a door that closes behind you, and room for a table with people sitting round it.
Safe and secure, drawn in from the startThe lighting, the sightlines, who can reach a front door and who holds a key. Designed in from the first drawing rather than bolted on once somebody asks for it.
And the lock is hersHer key, her name beside the door. She decides who comes in and when, which for a great many women is the part that matters most of all.
Who SAGE Is Built For
Two women, and the same front door answers both.
A woman who has worked her whole lifeShe has raised people, held jobs, paid rent on time for 30 years. Then the rent began moving faster than anything she earns, and one landlord’s decision put her whole life on a website full of inspection times. She has done every single part of this right.
And a woman leaving a home that was never safeShe needs somewhere to go that is hers, with a lock she controls, in a street where people notice each other. Getting out is the hardest act of her life; having somewhere to arrive is what makes it possible.
50 rather than 55The age on the door is 50, and the reason is the whole of it: prevention only works before the fall. A woman who finds a home she can hold at 52 is a woman who never meets the housing system at 68.
What She Pays
Worked Out On What She Earns.
Supported and subsidised, the way it should be, so the rent is never the reason she cannot stay.
How It Gets Built
Every Listing On Esmeralda Pays Toward It.
List a property with us and you have found an Esmeralda and put a brick in somebody else’s wall on the same afternoon.