News that the community trust which has owned the island of Gigha for the past 12 years faces some financial difficulties was widely reported this week.
A strategic review of the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust found the trust was " in a precarious financial position, with total third-party debts of £2.7m. The overall debt structure is unsustainable based on current revenues."
It seems, however, that with an assets portfolio recently valued at around £7.5m, the position may not be so pressing as it once appeared. Indeed, there are many in the land who would be delighted to think their house was worth almost three times the outstanding mortgage on it.
Talking of houses, when the community was buying the island, a housing conditions survey highlighted the scale of the task ahead. It found that of the 42 houses that came with the estate, 75% were classed as "below tolerable standard" and should not be inhabited, while 23% classed were "in serious disrepair".
"If we put in a nail or a hinge, or put a slate on a roof, we will have done a bloody sight more than has been done for decades under our landlords," Willie McSporran - who was to become the trust chairman - said at the time.
Meanwhile, it also revealed a high level of hidden homelessness, parents or siblings providing homes for adults.
Now, well over 30 of the properties have been renovated. Around £160,000 has been spent on each of the houses, with 60% coming in the form of grants and the rest raised one way or another by the community.
In 2011 the community's efforts were recognised by the Chartered Institute of Housing in Scotland, with its prestigious Excellence in Regeneration Award.
These houses alone must be worth over £4.5m.
Money was also spent adding a fourth wind community turbine to the island's "Three Dancing Ladies" which were already earning over £100,000 a year.
So Gigha has been a story about investment, albeit one which could have been written with different chapters on borrowing. It is a story of an island stemming generations of depopulation.
The possibility of one of Scotland's headline community buyouts becoming financially troubled has always been a possibility, just as any privately owned business or estate can get into difficulty. But supporters of the community land movement have long been concerned about the likely response from some self-appointed guardians of the public purse.
It was something addressed by historian Jim Hunter in his study of community ownership in the Highlands and Islands
The Carnegie UK Trust commissioned Professor Hunter to write the story of community buyouts over the past 20 years, and From The Low Tide of the Sea to the Highest Mountain Tops was published in 2012.
In the conclusion, he wrote that maintaining the necessary commitment to such projects by local residents was a constant challenge, and continued: "That is why it is by no means impossible that, sooner or later, one - or more than one - of the local land trusts operating in the Highlands and Islands will get into financial difficulty, maybe even go under.
"If or when this happens, critics and opponents of community ownership will insist that the community ownership concept has thereby been invalidated. They will be wrong. The bankruptcy of a conventionally structured company - something which happens every day - does not of itself indicate that other companies are bound to meet the same fate.
"Nor will the failure of a community ownership trust in any way signal that other such trusts are necessarily heading for the rocks. After all, if the record of private landownership in the Highlands an Islands was the be judged by the number of landlords who have gone spectacularly bust, often with very bad consequences for their tenants and dependants, then time would have been called on such ownership very many years ago."
And for those who questioned whether public money should be spent on the buyouts, Professor Hunter had some comparisons. The £30m total from public and lottery sources which helped take half-a-million acres of land into community control over two decades was equivalent to the bill for only 600 yards of Edinburgh's tramlines.
In fact it amounted to less than 7% of the cost of the five-mile M74 completion stretch of motorway in Glasgow and matched the subsidy farmers and landowners receive in Britain every three or four days.
Money well spent or what?
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