Tenants Will Come To A Party.

Now is the time for all good parties to come to the aid of the tenant.

Does anybody out there care? Politicians must wake up to renters, because right now, across the board there is too much empty, extended, obfuscatory rhetoric with several ‘consultation processes’ in progress but no actual help. Tellingly, this year’s budget helped older, richer voters. There’s the clue – voters: people who vote. The consensus is that renters don’t vote and so do not count.

This renders tenants invisible; it’s as if we don’t exist. Some renters move so frequently that the simple act of maintaining their place on the electoral register is a challenge.

The Tories and their Libdem servants legislate for and represent landlords (here the aristocratic term is, I think for once, worth using) but then many MP’s of all parties are rentiers. I doubt they will abandon self-interest and enact laws to end revenge evictions (where tenants are given notice for requesting vital repairs, no matter how necessary.)

Most importantly, we won’t be entitled to longer tenancies; consequently, our insecurity endures.

Tenants are varied. We come from all classes, ages and lifestyles. We’re not simply young people waiting to buy. We are divorced dads who did not stay in the family home. We are single people. We move on short term contracts to wherever the work is. Bankruptcy in the recession caused some owners to lose their house; they now rent homes in penury.

Elsewhere tenants are ‘forced landlords’ unable sell their house, who rent for the freedom to move without a chain. Renters include those in sheltered housing, impoverished bedsit dwellers and those forced out of social housing into the costly, problematic PRS because of the bedroom tax.

My own former landlord was a tenant simultaneously, since he rented his flat to me so that he could complete a work project in a peaceful, rented haven beside the seaside.

Tenants might be students, who could be rich or very poor: from those whose parents buy a home to let to their children and friends for the duration of their studies, to those in rat infested hovels.

Some renters are rich. Really rich. They rent while in the process of moving, having sold their mansions. Others are starving and rent out sheds from those rare but attention-grabbing rogues.

Tenants are old, young, middle-aged and many have children. All have one thing in common – they are shocked by the lack of rights (including price controls) and by being treated as if we don’t matter.

Labour did mention rents in their budget response, so I wonder if they’re slowly noticing the many people housed in the private sector and that potentially we hold real power? The Tories do not care. They believe we do not vote.

Somebody should campaign to encourage renters to join the electoral register and then to vote, speak to us nicely and address our needs. Perhaps then tenants could come to the aid of a political party, by voting for whoever helps them.

School Run(In)

Letting agents with ideas above their station (floating below pond life – lower even than the slime at the bottom of the pond) have appropriated terminology from their fellow gargoyles - estate agents. Both speak a language known to earth people as ‘bollocks’ and an advert that might once have read: “Flat. One room. Furnished. Rent £450 pcm. On Street,” now reads: “Well appointed bijou residence with friendly, self-annointed drainers and front-loading entrance. Stylish splash-guards permeate widespread pavemented zone enjoying luxurious police presence and accessible chemical delivery operatives.”

Another selling point mentioned in rental-ads is a tempting variation on this: “Close to excellent school.” Here’s why. Many parents aspire to live next to the excellent St Misfits (Ofsted report: “Urchins walk in about as smart as one of Kasabian, but emerge as clever as Stephen Hawking.) This encourages parents to use the wily guiles of leaden-hearted politicians to ensure that little Bastard gets to a good school, where they will be taught to read poetry, and not how to write graffiti about gangs and crack on the walls of their own home.

Does anybody question why a family of three would live in a bedsit or even a studio flat described as: “Economically spaced - ideal for the smaller sized.” Or that they never seem to visit? But then, I’ve heard of families making an extravagant show of visiting their ‘home,’ you know – walking a dog, being seen coming and going (and then going again) with the big weekly shop, and sitting in the lounge etc.

Being in the same area as a good school ups the price of property, be it rented or owned. Admittedly, some naughty people have been caught in the act by vigilant councils using spies for covert surveillance, but many still get away with it. Remember the days when children walked to a local school, and if it wasn’t very good, or failing, then parents would unite to improve it, rather than organise a mass escape?

A friend is currently subsisting on a low income, and sensibly rents a home within her meagre budget, all the while gazing longingly at glowing Ofsted-approved schools on the other side of town, where you have to be affluent, if not actually loaded with bling to afford a home, rented or otherwise. She really wants to move, but can only afford a tiny one-bed flat with no garden – not much for her growing lad. Another friend stayed in a rented home next to the failing local school, and did her best to improve things via the PTA. She helped her child with homework, and eventually paid for a private tutor. Then she gave up entirely and moved (admittedly, being a tenant made this easier.)

Houses in the catchment areas of little genius factories are rocketing in price, and price tags on accommodation close to finishing schools for the prison system are plummeting. Wealthy articulate people will always subvert a system, even when obliged to ‘lower’ themselves to renting property to do so, and there’s no guarantee of a place. Even worse, they will join on this frantic, whirling, danse macabre of renting hell (albeit briefly…)

Death In The Dovecot

In Dovecot Towers, you hear a lot from people you may never see. For example, someone a few doors down loved The Arctic Monkeys. They played it loud - not annoyingly so, but just enough that I noticed.

Last Sunday afternoon I met some new people in the lift, who got out at my floor. They were Australian, and had been buying household items, like a clothes line and a bin. I wondered if they’d just moved in. They’d been here one week: it was The Arctic Monkeys fan and his girlfriend. Carefully, I did my good citizen bit and explained that they needed to ask the landlord to fit a new lock. They didn’t even know who their landlord was, since they had used a letting agency. I gave them the caretaker’s number, and wished them all the best in their new home.

At 2am the following morning I was woken up by screaming and footsteps pounding frantically along the corridor (nothing unusual there). But then I heard a woman begging someone not to touch her, shouting “Keep away from me!”

Envisaging a street attack or a drunken domestic assault, I was racing for my phone when I heard a loud bump, then more screaming, then another ominous thud. On the street below, a woman was pleading frantically for help.

Her boyfriend had jumped from the balcony. It was my near neighbour, the male half of the couple I’d chatted to in the lift that afternoon. She was calling an ambulance, beseeching them to hurry, while begging her boyfriend not to die.

Repeatedly she cried inconsolably: “…this can’t be happening…this can’t be happening.”
She didn’t know what to do, and called the ambulance again, urging them to hurry. I screamed down at her from my balcony to keep him still; that moving him might cause even more harm, but the words: “…his brains are all over road…” made me realise that moving him would make no difference now. Concerned at having heard her earlier begging someone not to touch her, I called the police, who were already on their way.

The Dovecot Towers trademark ‘Heads-Over-The-Railings-Tenants-Ad-Hoc-Residents-Association’ appeared. There was nothing to be done. Judging by the way he was lying, he had died instantly. The young woman bolted a short distance down the street, and faced the wall, shouting: “This isn’t happening!” before turning around and realising that yes, it was really happening. She was remonstrating with her boyfriend: “Oh God, what have you done, don’t die, I love you, I love you. Please don’t leave me.

Then another man appeared, clearly in as bad a state as she was. She said: “Keep away from me, don’t touch me!” then: “It’s all my fault.”
The man said he felt responsible. No ambulance yet, so they called again. She noticed her boyfriend wasn’t breathing, and they attempted to resuscitate him, but to their horror, there was blood in his mouth. A window opened and a woman yelled at her to shut up but another resident, aware of the desperate scenario unfolding below, retaliated: “Shut the fuck up yourself you selfish bitch.”

The ambulance arrived. The paramedic took one look at the broken body lying prone and bleeding on the street and shook his head. He covered the dead man with a blanket. Her remaining hopes extinguished, she berated the paramedic: “You didn’t even try!”

The police came, taped off the scene, and shepherded the girl away from the lifeless man and into the ambulance, where her visceral howling punctured the night. Suddenly police spilled out of vans, unmarked cars arrived and men in suits surveyed the scene. I heard the police enter their flat, heard her crying, and watched them leave in clean clothes, carrying luggage. She was led towards a car. Just before she got in, she curled herself into a ball and rocked to and fro, as a policeman looked on helplessly. Even the police were distressed. I heard one officer say he’d seen dead bodies, but nothing like that before.

Suddenly it was all quiet, and the dead man, with one fractured, contorted leg poking out from underneath the blanket, was left alone in a cordoned off area on the street, watched over by a solitary police van. He looked so lonely. By seven am the corpse had been moved. It was raining. A pool of brain matter was left in a gutter, until the scene of crime cleaners washed it away.

I’ve no idea what happened in that flat; what made a young man jump to his death, and I don’t suppose I ever will. As I write this, someone is embarking on a twenty-four journey from Australia to collect their dead son: the son I spoke to briefly, but never knew.

Does this have anything to do with Dovecot Towers? Maybe; possibly – but then again, perhaps not. People move in and out with alarming frequency, flats are now rented by the month, week, or even by the day. Life is tenuous, alienating, prickly and dehumanised. We don’t know each other. Problems seem larger here, isolation is exacerbated and arguments are inescapable in a tiny one bed flat.

And what about the devastated young woman, who was asking the world, the pavement, God, the sky or anyone, for help? Tomorrow, she’ll wake up and face the future alone with a ruined life, returning home to the flat where her world ended, her soul forever scarred. I’ll never forget the couple I met in a lift, and the harrowing primal sound she made will stay with me forever.