Generation Rent: We’re F*cked

Published on Ideal Flatmate

By this stage, it’s old news that the London housing situation is broken. It’s a crisis. So much so that we are, in fact, calling it The Housing Crisis: every time we’re pushed to the point of thinking, ‘bloody hell, lads, this is it. This crisis can’t get anymore critical. This is a crisis with knobs on, THE crisis of crises, sweet lord in heaven it can’t POSSIBLY get anymore ridiculous than this’ — well, it goes and does just that.

Since the days of good old Thatcher, things have gone from bad to worse: a succession of government policies continuing to stoke up demand for homes whilst simultaneously inhibiting their supply. The result? Soaring prices. Homeownership rates on a seemingly relentless downward spiral. Generation Rent, as we’re so dearly called: the poor bastards who – alas, no matter how many pennies we save sneaking our lukewarm cans of Kronenbourg into the pub – will never scrape enough together for a deposit on a place.

‘When the market is greedy, be fearful. When the market is fearful, be greedy’. So the mantra ripples through the clusters of middle-aged, well-suited white dudes that make up the property investors and private landlords of London. They probably congregate and chant it, naked in a circle, before scoffing over the benefits of renting out what aren’t even flats, much less homes – ambitious cupboards, we’ll call them – to lowly peasants for extortionate fees. A housing crisis for the poor is a playground for the rich.

The thing is, it’s all well and good for someone like me to joke. It’s easy for me to laugh it off in a Bridget Jones-esque ‘ha ha ha aren’t our lives tragic now let’s all go down the pub’ kind of way. Because I know I’ll never be homeless — I’m a middle-class white girl, lucky enough to have parents in London that won’t let that happen.

But those who aren’t, and who don’t? Their livelihoods are being destroyed. Literally.

Perhaps one of the most heart-breaking cases to date was that of thirty-five men found to be living in a three-bedroom house in Queensbury. It sounds like the kind of hyperbolic scenario I’d write to comically labour a point — but it’s real. The men had piled bedding in every room except the bathrooms, with mattresses laid out even in the garden. In one room alone, eight men were sleeping side-by-side, mattresses taking up every existing inch of floor space.

The property owner, Sunil Hathi, refuted claims he was a ‘rogue landlord’, stressing that he’d let the house to three men and had never been aware of any other tenants. This may be true, but the fact remains that if the housing market was not in such a dire state – a state infinitely exploited by landlords across the capital, whether Hathi is guilty or not – then working people would not be pushed to such desperate measures.

London mayor Sadiq Khan has promised to crack down on criminal landlords, this autumn introducing a new online database highlighting landlords and letting agents who have been prosecuted for housing offences. This way, renters can check up on future or current landlords. It’s a step in the right direction, sure — but how many reprobate landlords are actually being prosecuted? How much of the exploitation going on is actually deemed illegal? Short answer: not nearly enough.

Take the very-much-legal exploitation that’s been doing the rounds in recent years: that of private landlords renting to housing benefit recipients and manipulating the system so as to extract as much money as possible from the taxpayer. Local Housing Allowance (LHA) – used to calculate how much housing benefit people are entitled to – is supposed to be enough to pay for the cheapest 30 per cent of properties in any given area: that means that if you can find the very cheapest properties in the area, you can rent them out to housing benefit claimants and get them to claim as much rent as if the place was at the top of that 30 per cent. Then you spend the whole lot on Bollinger for yourself and your mistress! And the best part? You’re not committing even one crime! Fuck you, taxpayers! And it gets worse. The Guardian reports:

“Three-bed houses, where the maximum weekly housing benefit for flat-sharers is under £100 a person, are being converted into as many as six tiny self-contained studios – as little as 10 sq m in size. Each then qualifies for housing benefit of £181 a week, enabling a landlord to squeeze £56,000 a year in rent from a property on London’s fringes, all paid from public funds.”

Supposedly, last year saw ‘substantial’ governmental intervention in the rental market with George Osborne’s three per cent stamp duty hike on second homes (intended to cool down buy-to-let investment) and Philip Hammond’s banning letting agents fees for tenants. But with so many MPs being private landlords, it’s unlikely – at best – that London’s slimy property barons will be seeing the comeuppance they deserve any time soon.

We’ve still got a long way to go.