Displaced renters like me must turn to Spareroom, a website that in theory allows tenants with a free room to find a housemate. The experience is rather like using Tinder, in that you’re forced to lie about your personality so strangers will like you (everyone loves the pub, but also a quiet night in; tidy but not obsessive; social but conscious of other people’s space, etc).
Spareroom rather hilariously admonishes the Government for allowing the rental crisis to get this bad.
“Demand for rentals has soared yet, since 2017, supply has almost halved,” despairs the company’s open letter to the Chancellor. That high demand means most spare rooms are snapped up within a week – but to enquire about a new listing before then you have to pay a subscription fee.
As with dating apps, the experience is marred by catfishes – flats that look great in photos but are dirty and filled with broken furniture in the flesh. The worst offenders are almost always advertised by letting agents, who I have since learned to avoid.
I visited a four-bed flat last week – it had a tiny kitchen and an equally small shared bathroom. What I assume was once a living room had been turned into a bedroom, and all four of these had coded locks on the door. £1,000 each a month.
Labour is going to save everything, so we’re told, by building a load of houses on the green belt to even up the supply-demand imbalance.
I don’t care for Nimbys and it will be nice to upset them. But I am curious as to how this is going to solve the immediate problem of sky-high rents being charged for dilapidated houses in cities where young people should be living and working.
Are we expecting all of Britain’s 20-somethings to relocate to newbuilds in the shires? And when these hundreds of thousands of homes finally show up, are existing landlords going to stop demanding higher and higher rents?
Why is every new home here only affordable for the super-rich parents of foreign students? Why are we encouraging developers to keep building them? Many such questions I am not convinced Labour has the answers to.
I’m sad that London is like this now. It’s a slight on a city this great that homes here have been allowed to deteriorate, while those in charge of them squeeze their tenants for ever larger shares of their income. No one is entitled to live in London, but it shouldn’t be this hard.
