The first time I met my host was on a sunny Thursday morning, completely naked and suffering from the worst hangover of my life.
Before I even had time to register a knock on my door, I screamed as the owner and his valet burst into my bedroom for an inspection they had not warned me about. When they finally left, we received a message: “Please ensure the property is in acceptable condition on our next visit.”
We never heard from him again.
That was nearly 10 years ago, when I was a student and paying £700 a month to live in a four-bedroom house on a neglected estate in Kennington. I wish I could say my experiences of the rental market in London’s Wild West had improved, but I’d be lying.
London rentals are in a state of comical disrepair, after being cheaply fixed up. In one flat, my flatmate and I spent an entire night trying to stop the sink from flooding the kitchen, as it often does whenever we use the washing machine, thanks to a creative plumbing job the landlord did to squeeze another bedroom into the flat.
I am currently 28 and have a Section 21 notice in my inbox. My current landlord has decided to increase the rent to more than I can afford, having already increased it last year (the proposed increase would have reached 14% in just two years).
The bargaining didn’t work; my landlord bought the house next door and rented it out for whatever he wanted, so at least my neighbors are in the same situation.
I have a month to find a place to live and then move. I spent a lot of time throwing away or selling worldly possessions that I suspected wouldn’t fit in the new place — I guess I was wrong for taking the liberty of acquiring things.
I’m certainly not the only one dealing with this. My friends are in constant fear of the next rent increase, and even as they get raises and promotions, their income-to-rent ratios somehow get worse.
On Twitter, I see people asking how they can plead for more compassionate rents. Some say they are facing “bait-and-switch” Section 21s, where landlords decide their tenants can’t afford the rent, lie about selling the house to get them out, and then put the property back on the market for the rent they want.
Official figures show that private rents paid by tenants in the UK rose by 6.2% last year. In London, the figure rose to 6.8%.
That’s what the ONS says. What my colleagues say is that with every lease renewal comes a rent increase. Without exception. It’s usually a round number made up out of thin air – £100, £200, £300. If that doesn’t match your salary, which it certainly doesn’t, then it’s tough.
Of course, if London’s property standards were to improve significantly, all would be well. But they aren’t. Britain has some of the oldest housing stock in Europe, and many of the houses I’ve seen have been left untouched since the rental boom of the 1990s.
At my last place I watched in amazement as a handyman, hired cheaply by an estate agent, cut a few holes in the wall to ‘vent’ damp that had seeped in through a poorly sealed chimney. He came back a week later, said the wall was ‘just stained’, plugged the holes, repainted the wall and left. The damp was back a week later.
I knew very little about the man who owned the house, and he knew even less about us or the property. I had the privilege of speaking to him on the phone once, and he asked me, “How many bedrooms are there?” I sighed. Sorry, I’m a bit busy – I’m hosting a wedding in my garden.
A bit of research revealed that the house was bought in 1999 for a bargain price of £170,000, meaning we effectively paid off our landlord’s mortgage during our tenure alone. Neighbouring houses are now worth just under £1m.
It turns out that most of the homes here were purchased during the aforementioned buy-to-let boom, and the property ended up doing double duty as the boomers’ retirement annuities. I would suggest that renters never check the sales history of their homes if they value their sanity.
This is why I roll my eyes when I hear rent increases justified by the mortgage crisis, net zero targets for energy efficiency or the removal of tax breaks – because I’m not sure most London landlords are really facing these issues.
From 2014 to 2020, average investment-grade mortgages fell steadily by nearly two percent, long before the tax credits were reduced, according to data from analyst Moneyfacts.
What’s more, these daunting net zero targets were scrapped by Michael Gove after homeowners threatened to sell their homes rather than take over the Monopoly board and face a single regulation.
Others snidely suggest that rising rents are simply a case of supply and demand. Rents are high because six desperate guys like me are after every room in this city. Some call it profiteering.
All this to say I’m not sure what “costs” anyone is talking about. Rents have been rising for no reason long before the Truss mini-Budget, and tenants have no way of challenging rent increases if they suspect, for example, that their landlord is making money on a property that doesn’t have a mortgage.
There’s a knock on my door – someone wants to know how to get into the Airbnb on the corner. I’d never have thought Tower Hamlets would become a hub for holiday homes, let alone the street where drug dealers regularly hang out. But according to official figures, one in 20 properties here is a second home.
This is really good, isn’t it? In a borough where around 20,000 people are on waiting lists for social housing, around 8,000 properties are not even lived in full time. It’s great that we allow this to happen. I don’t understand why Airbnb is allowed to operate in London (in New York, hosts can’t rent out a home for less than 30 days unless the host is staying with guests).
Displaced tenants like me have to turn to Spareroom, a website that theoretically allows tenants with a free room to find a roommate. The experience is a lot like using Tinder, in that you are forced to lie about your personality to get strangers to like you (everyone loves the pub, but also enjoys a quiet night at home; tidy but not obsessive; social but aware of other people’s space, etc.).
Spareroom is quite hilariously calling out the Government for allowing the rent crisis to get so bad.
“Demand for rental properties has soared, with supply almost halving since 2017,” the company wrote in an open letter to the Chancellor. That high demand means most spare rooms are snapped up within a week – but you have to pay a subscription fee to find out about a new listing before then.
As is often the case with dating apps, the experience is marred by catfish—apartments that look great in photos but are actually filthy and full of broken furniture. The worst offenders are almost always advertised by estate agents, and I’ve learned to stay away from them.
Last week I visited a four-bedroom flat with a tiny kitchen and an equally tiny shared bathroom. What I assume was once a living room had been converted into a bedroom, and all four flats had coded locks on the doors. £1,000 a month for each.
It is said that Labour will save everything by building lots of houses in the green belt to balance the supply-demand imbalance.
I don’t care about the Nimbys and it would be nice to upset them, but I wonder how this will solve the pressing problem of exorbitant rents being charged for dilapidated housing in cities where young people are supposed to live and work.
Are we expecting all the 20-somethings in Britain to move into new developments in the shires? And when those hundreds of thousands of homes eventually come into existence, will existing landlords stop charging ever higher rents?
Why is every new home here only affordable to the super-rich parents of foreign students? Why do we encourage developers to keep building them? There are many questions I am not convinced Labour has the answers to.
I am sorry for the state of London at present. It is an insult to such a great city that its houses are allowed to deteriorate, that those responsible for them are squeezing their tenants for greater shares of their income. No one deserves to live in London, but it should not be this hard.