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Fifteen rented homes in 15 years – mine is an everyday housing story
Topic Started: 6 Oct 2015, 03:45 PM (2,568 Views)
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Fifteen rented homes in 15 years – mine is an everyday housing story

Rosie Walker, Sunday 4 October 2015

Growing up, I never expected to be economically dependent – not even partially – on a man. That was the stuff of Jane Austen novels and if you’d told my younger self that was where I’d be in my mid-30s I would have laughed in your face.

But I was a child in the 80s and we thought we’d have hoverboards by 2015. We thought we’d have homes, too, as long as we made a tiny bit of effort. One particular bit of 80s thinking went unquestioned, at least to me: the belief that as long as you did your homework, made a reasonable stab at A-levels and university, then – barring natural disasters – it would lead to a decent job and a proper home. Not a villa or a luxury car. Just, you know, an ordinary home with functioning water and electricity, less than an hour away from the job that would pay for it.

However, by the time I hit 35 – two years ago – I’d lived in 15 privately rented homes and instead of savings had debts. The jobs that, back in the hoverboard-expecting days, would have been called “good” (journalism, teaching, university research) turned out to be insecure, on short-term contracts, at rates that haven’t risen in 10 years. They pay enough to be comfortable, with the odd holiday and evening in the pub, but the bulk has always gone on rent. Not luxury pad rent, but damp-room-in-grotty-houseshare rent. Rent that now averages £700 a month per room in (unglamorous) parts of London, according to a survey published last week.

After I’d been evicted from my 15th home for asking my landlord for minor repairs, I moved in with my partner, who, because he inherited some money from a grandparent, owns a small flat. We earn the same wages and we split the bills. But, occasionally, Jane Austen characters and 1950s housewives stalk my nightmares. It’s not the same, of course: these days, it could just as easily be the woman who owns and the man who doesn’t. Gender no longer comes into it. But if it weren’t for my partner, God knows what kind of temporary shelter I’d be able to rent now.

There’s been another shift, too. Family wealth has always played some role in property, but in the recent past, young adults “helped up” might have endured a bit of harmless ribbing from their less lucky mates. There might have been a few harsh words, maybe a beery rant about “loadsamonies” or “toffs” (even if the lucky ones were from ordinary backgrounds), but it would all have come out in the wash. Mostly. Those doing the ribbing would know that they’d probably have a home too, just slightly later in life.

These days, it’s less funny. “Normal” has changed. It’s normal, now, on finding yourself lucky enough to buy a home, to rent your spare room to a friend and charge them the entirety of your monthly mortgage. After all, it’s still “mates’ rates” if it’s £50 less than they’d pay to the landlord down the road, and it’s probably a more pleasant experience, so who’s complaining?

Nobody, really, until some killjoy whispers the words “pension” or “wealth transfer”, and dares to think about how different those two friends’ lives will be aged 60, when one owns outright the asset that the other has paid for in rent. One’s retirement will be on a state pension and housing benefit. The other’s rather nicer.

For my forthcoming co-authored book The Rent Trap, I interviewed people on both sides of this divide. I wanted to see what our dysfunctional private rented sector is doing to social relations – not just the growing wealth inequality charted by economists, but the friendships and peer groups, the personal relationships and families.

I interviewed people in their 30s who’d remortgaged their one-bedroom home on a buy to let and used the rental income to cover not just that mortgage, but also the mortgage on a second flat. I spoke to someone with a salary of £40,000 who charges his lodger, who earns half his salary, the whole of the mortgage, and people who had given up their jobs in their early 30s to live off the rental income from their friends in the box room.

I interviewed one woman who genuinely believed that she paid a third of the “rent” on the house that she owned and lived in, but when we sat down and did the sums, we saw that her two tenants were covering much more than the mortgage and the amount she paid was just a sum going into her bank account. It seemed a surprise even to her.

None of the landlords felt able to use the words “landlord” or “tenant”, preferring “flatmate” or “friend”, and some stressed that what they were doing was “just a casual arrangement”. None was from an exceptionally privileged background – many were downright ordinary – and all were decent, friendly folk who demonstrated concern for social problems and voted Labour or Green. But housing, unlike anything else, brings out a kind of blindness.

When the buy-to-let mortgage was introduced in the mid-90s, being a private landlord went from being a faintly grubby activity to something anyone could do to their peers. Back then, it was even possible to buy without family wealth, a distant memory now. But the new housing world required a new mindset, a new “common sense” that profiting from someone’s loss was a morally neutral thing to do.

A “good” landlord, who would never dream of a no-fault eviction, who would drop everything to fix their tenant’s broken boiler, can easily charge a rent that leaves their tenant little to live on – let alone anything to save. That, they might tell themselves, is not their problem: it’s “just” the market. It’s as if, when it comes to property, we’ve disconnected actions from social consequences. We prefer to see market-driven inequality as random, chaotic, like a game of snakes and ladders. As if the housing game is so absurd that the moves we make within it have no meaning. But they do.

None of this would matter if the exits were still open: if ordinary people could save up and buy a home with a mortgage or if they could move into social housing and pay rent to a council. But both exits are blocked and wages have become meaningless: a shabby two-bedroom flat in London zone 3 can pull in more money in a year than a person working full time on the London living wage. Sometimes, wealth inequality has to be carefully revealed by social scientists, t-tests and regression analysis. But in the private rented sector, it’s there in sharp, zero-sum relief. And no one can bear to look.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/04/happy-exploit-friends-housing-buy-to-let
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lonewolf
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Why on earth would you be so depressed and live in there!!! The UK visa allows you to go / work anywhere everywhere in the world !
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newjez
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lonewolf
6 Oct 2015, 10:32 PM
Why on earth would you be so depressed and live in there!!! The UK visa allows you to go / work anywhere everywhere in the world !
Exactly. My second cousin andher hubby, both under 30 just bought a news house in Stevenage. Needs work, but they are young and fit. Both teachers. Nota problem.
Whenever you have an argument with someone, there comes a moment where you must ask yourself, whatever your political persuasion, 'am I the Nazi?'
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lonewolf
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newjez
6 Oct 2015, 11:07 PM
Exactly. My second cousin andher hubby, both under 30 just bought a news house in Stevenage. Needs work, but they are young and fit. Both teachers. Nota problem.
I am renting in sydney and spending about 20% of my after tax income on rent, gives me the opportunity to save most of it for rainy days. I might move out to cheaper regions once I have enough saved to buy out something outright for 400k in next 4-5 years..I would never stay here if rent cost more than 30% .. then again, i'm a migrant .. i'm used to moving.
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stinkbug
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"However, by the time I hit 35 – two years ago – I’d lived in 15 privately rented homes and instead of savings had debts."

So a bit of a loser, financial speaking.
---------------------------------------------------------------

While it's true that those who win never quit, and those who quit never win, those who never win and never quit are idiots.

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Veritas
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stinkbug
7 Oct 2015, 12:07 AM
"However, by the time I hit 35 – two years ago – I’d lived in 15 privately rented homes and instead of savings had debts."

So a bit of a loser, financial speaking.
Or someone who is low paid and intermittently out of work.

There are plenty of working poor in this world.

Even the Western world.
Property acquisition as a topic was almost a national obsession. You couldn't even call it speculation as the buyers all presumed the price of property could only go up. That’s why we use the word obsession. Ordinary people were buying properties for their young children who had not even left school assuming they would not be able to afford property of their own when they left college- Klaus Regling on Ireland. Sound familiar?

The evidence of nearly 40 cycles in house prices for 17 OECD economies since 1970 shows that real house prices typically give up about 70 per cent of their rise in the subsequent fall, and that these falls occur slowly.
Morgan Kelly:On the Likely Extent of Falls in Irish House Prices, 2007
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createdby
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Looks like typical gen X/Y who drank a lifetime's worth of lattes the equivalent of 50-100 thousand pounds.

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If she didn't have a caffeine addiction, she would have had enough deposit for a starter home amirite?
Edited by createdby, 7 Oct 2015, 12:43 AM.
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Matthew
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newjez
6 Oct 2015, 11:07 PM
Exactly. My second cousin andher hubby, both under 30 just bought a news house in Stevenage. Needs work, but they are young and fit. Both teachers. Nota problem.
could they teach you spelling, and grammar by any chance? :D
My only hope for my three boys is that they turn out nothing at all like Chris.
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newjez
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createdby
7 Oct 2015, 12:40 AM
Looks like typical gen X/Y who drank a lifetime's worth of lattes the equivalent of 50-100 thousand pounds.

Posted Image

If she didn't have a caffeine addiction, she would have had enough deposit for a starter home amirite?
'You could probably buy a house by drinking coffee At home and taking a pack lunch
Whenever you have an argument with someone, there comes a moment where you must ask yourself, whatever your political persuasion, 'am I the Nazi?'
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Jimbo
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lonewolf
6 Oct 2015, 11:47 PM
I am renting in sydney and spending about 20% of my after tax income on rent, gives me the opportunity to save most of it for rainy days. I might move out to cheaper regions once I have enough saved to buy out something outright for 400k in next 4-5 years..I would never stay here if rent cost more than 30% .. then again, i'm a migrant .. i'm used to moving.
She was evicted from her last place for asking her landlord to carry out "minor repairs"?

She is a university educated, articulate book writer and she was evicted for asking her landlord to carry out "minor repairs" on her fifteenth rented property in as many years?

And she is writing a book that she thinks people will buy?

So she can get enough money to buy a house?

And I am writing a response to this crap?

Time for bed....

Matthew, 30 Jan 2016, 09:21 AM Your simplistic view is so flawed it is not worth debating. The current oversupply will be swallowed in 12 months. By the time dumb shits like you realise this prices will already be :?: rising.
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