Renting in London right now is fucked
Kate Solomon on how it feels to be on the wrong side of Rightmove
Welcome to the first LiB issue of the Carolean era.
Even though today is a public holiday, we didn’t want to suspend our normal service, partly because we’ve been on a break for a week, but also because the subject of today’s issue is one that can’t really wait.
The word ‘crisis’ has lost much of its power over the last year or so, (hence the presence of that last word in today’s headline - it may jam up a few spam filters but we think it’s warranted); but make no mistake about it, London’s rental market is in a state of total and utter chaos right now and it is making our city unliveable for thousands of people.
There are numbers we could throw at you to demonstrate this. Numbers like £2,257 (the average asking rent per month in London Between June and August), or 16%, (the amount average rent has gone up in the past year). But if you really want to get the full impact of what’s going on, then you need to hear it from someone who’s been on the front line.
A few months ago, after her relationship unexpectedly ended, writer Kate Solomon suddenly found herself “with nowhere to live during a time when renting somewhere in London was unexpectedly impossible”. Below you can find her tale of just what it’s like to be suddenly made to run the gauntlet of London’s rental market in 2022.
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There’s not really a good time to be dumped but I would say, on reflection, summer 2022 was the worst possible time.
Within seconds I went from being settled and… well, not happy exactly, but definitely still full of love for this one specific human and a blind faith that, no matter what, we could work it out - to adrift, alone in the world and homeless.
As you can see, I am still in the drama era of this breakup because I was obviously not alone in the world - my friends have proven themselves to be the absolute best humans - and I wasn’t homeless in the sense of literally not having a roof over my head (see previous comment re. amazing friends). But I suddenly found myself with nowhere to live during a time when renting somewhere in London was unexpectedly impossible.
The true horror of the situation wasn’t clear to me until later, when the crying was less 24/7 and more like 2/1. Somewhere deep in my brain was a voice saying “It’s okay, you’ll just move to a new flat and within a month or so life will regain its sense of balance”. My brain had clearly not been on Rightmove recently.
As a person with income and decent references, whenever I have moved in London it has meant a few weeks of flat viewings, a quick reference check, a hefty deposit handover and then in. That’s exactly how it went a year ago when [redacted] and I moved in together in Peckham, so forgive me for thinking that’s exactly how it would go this time.
I don’t think I was asking a lot: a similarly adrift friend and I needed a two bedroom flat that wasn’t a shithole. That was literally all we wanted. We had a budget and a number of locales in mind ranging from boujee-ish (Stoke Newington, where I lived before I moved to Pekcham) to not-very-boujee at all (Leyton). But from day one, our budget crept up and up and up.
We’d increase it by £50, and then another £50, and another, assuming this would give us more options than our initial findings of none. I spent hours searching for properties while nervously thinking “I’m sure I can make that work” every time I considered how much I actually earn. Both my friend and I earn decent wages, comfortably above the national average: it should not have been difficult to find somewhere we could afford to live. And anyway, surely we could negotiate on a final rental price (ha!).
We contacted every letting agent in the areas we were interested in, we set up search alerts and we started asking for viewings. We posted Insta stories and tweets in case friends had leads. We scoured SpareRoom and OpenRent and Gumtree and local noticeboards. Oh how I laugh looking back on that young, naive woman thinking it would be so straightforward.
The Wild West of putting an offer in
The first thing we learned was that the instant property alerts are only instant in the same way that a windowsill with a plant on it counts as a garden. If you don’t happen to be checking the sites as soon as a property goes up, you won’t get a viewing. You’ll be placed on a “waiting list” for viewings in case no one takes the flat from the first batch or, a more reliable method, you recant an ancient curse causing everyone ahead of you in the queue to come down with a terrible case of boils. More often than not, your details will just go in the bin.
If your dark magicks do get you in to see a deeply average flat that is slightly too small with no outdoor space and a temperature not far off that of the sun, then you will be there at the same time as 30 other people. If you’re looking at two-beds, most of these people will be couples, all surreptitiously budging you out of the way to get a look at the washing machine (no dryer), or whispering furtively to their partner about whether or not to put an offer in ten seconds after stepping over the threshold despite the fact that the bathroom is full of mould and the furniture (non negotiable) is disgusting.
If you think you can stomach living there, you must enter the Wild West that is putting an offer in. We heard stories of people offering so far over the asking price that even the low end of our budget was suddenly impossible. Some landlords will simply take the first offer they get, others will take the highest. One agent, whose property we referred to as “the dream flat” because it was the only actually nice one we’d seen, had an X Factor style set-up. Via her letting agent, she asked for all offers to come with a written statement which we workshopped painstakingly, being sure to really drive home the broken-hearted and homeless angle, only to learn she had let it to someone privately before we’d even looked around.
Suffice to say, our plan to negotiate the rent down did not come off.
The reasons behind this absolute clusterfuck
Even if you are one of those storied people happily renting a flat in London right now, that’s no guarantee that you’re safe from this insane situation. Landlords have been asking for enormous rent increases or unceremoniously serving notice only to put their property back on the market for hundreds of pounds more a month. There is currently no limit to what they can charge, and people are so desperate that they are agreeing to hugely inflated rents that are dragging the entire market up.
The reasons behind this absolute clusterfuck are many.
Firstly, let’s not forget we are ruled over by a government made up of landlords. Sure, the government is unrecognisable now, but in 2021, a quarter of Tory MPs were landlords. Even more MPs have some kind of financial interest in property as a whole. The property lobby is strong, the renters lobby is not - no huge surprise in a democracy where money buys power. There is very little impetus for a money-obsessed, property-owning ruling class to make rental properties more plentiful and affordable for plebs like us.
Casual landlords are also more likely to sell up due to the restriction of buy-to-let mortgage interest tax relief, which means that landlords now only get a 20% tax credit on interest payments, whereas before they could deduct mortgage expenses from their rental income. It’s all a bit cry-me-a-river when you’re relying on someone else to pay for a piece of property that you will own at the end of it, but it means one of two things: either the increased cost of being a landlord is being passed on to the renters via vast rent hikes, or that private properties are leaving the rental market as landlords decide there’s no point if they’re not making any money (on top of the property we are paying for).
So there are fewer properties around but just as many private renters. House building has ground to a halt. Renters have flocked back to London after leaving it for the pandemic era. Let’s not even start on how impossible it is to buy property in London without a helping financial hand from a relative. It’s all just a big mess - and for the most basic human need of shelter.
A unique kind of stress
I do know that I am very, very lucky. I am young (well, youngish), healthy, earning and have a robust support network, including parents in the Midlands who I will stay with for most of September.
Sleeping on air beds and sofas and carting my possessions around the various compass points of London has sucked - at my lowest point I was sharing the one bowl I thought to bring with me with my dog - but I’ve never been truly worried I will be on the streets. But still, this situation has left me feeling completely and utterly broken. It is a unique kind of stress, having no home to call your own. You never fully relax, you never entirely switch off and you are never not thinking about it. I’ve been one minor inconvenience away from a full breakdown since I left Peckham. I can’t imagine how much harder it is for people with kids, mobility issues, specific needs and low incomes.
We’ve known for a long time that the housing situation in London is broken. There seems little hope for anyone beyond high earners living any kind of comfortable life in the capital any more. This is my home. I have lived in London for nearly 20 years and I love it: my life is here, my friends are here. I don’t want to leave but without some kind of drastic action from on high, I don’t see how I can stay.
There is a happy interlude in my specific tale of housing woe. After months of fruitless hunting, a friend has offered to sublet us her flat while she goes travelling for six months. From October to April, I will actually have a bed and a kitchen and a toilet and wifi. It is amazing of her to offer, and a very welcome respite from this situation.
Sleeping in a bed rather than on a slowly deflating air mattress feels like the biggest luxury right now. But it does also delay the inevitable and will there be any more hope for London’s renters in spring than there is now?
Kate Solomon is the lead music critic for the i newspaper and her work has also appeared in the Guardian, GQ, Metro, Evening Standard, and Time Out.
Her book on the life of Amy Winehouse is out now.
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5 other bits
Today London will witness the biggest UK police operation ever, as more than 10,000 officers are drafted in to deal with the million-plus people who have descended on the city. 22 miles of barriers have been set up and there’s already been 34 arrests made (including one 19-year-old who was flashing people in the queue and tried to avoid capture by jumping into the Thames). The BBC has a full rundown of how today will play out, and if you need to get somewhere TfL’s travel advice page is here. If you want to see Joe Biden touching down at Stanstead this weekend, then the Aviation Highlights YouTube channel has you covered.
The ‘good news’ is that all these people coming to London to pay their respects are also giving our economy “a much-needed boost”. Fortune magazine spoke to a ‘professor of tourism management’ who inadvertently equated the death of a monarch to the Marvel Cinematic Universe when she stated that “there are potentially great spinoffs from this”. She’s not wrong though, apparently the average price for a hotel night has “increased from $244 to $384” since the announcement of the Queen’s death.
Following the fatal shooting of the 24-year-old unarmed Chis Kaba by a Met officer two weeks ago, there was a rally outside New Scotland Yard on Saturday. The protest was organised by the Justice for Chris Kaba campaign who have described the timeframe of the IOPC’s investigation (expected to take 6-9 months) as “unacceptably long and lacking urgency”. In a statement, Sadiq Khan said, “The IOPC have confirmed to me that they are fully committed to carrying out a thorough and comprehensive investigation to establish all of the facts - with all key findings made public.”
Yesterday, 24-year-old Mohammed Rahman was charged with attempted murder and multiple other offences, after two Met officers were stabbed in Leicester Square on Friday. Rahman will appear at Wimbledon Magistrates’ Court later today.
If you thought this month couldn’t get any more British, it looks like the annual London Bridge sheep drive will be going ahead this weekend.