Consequences.

In certain places, rents are out of control. Mostly in London of course, but also cities and towns such as Aberdeen and Warwick – historically beautiful locations where building is controlled or limited. Rents here increase so fast and by so much that renting a home will soon be out of reach (buying a place is already impossible for many).

Even renting in what used to be considered the badlands of London (districts marked ‘Here be dragons’ on the A-Z) is just a fleeting, distant dream. You can tell by the number of tanning salons and betting shops that these so-called affordable areas are... challenging. Add the cost in time and money of all that travelling to and from work, and living is as expensive as in more central locations.

Sadly and inevitably, rising prices have unintended consequences. People need homes but must pay these scandalous rents, and so, when pay is low and work scare and precarious (it still is – despite the tory myth of recovery) renters wrangle for cash to keep a roof over their head.

But the low supply/high demand model explains the game of poker forced on prospective tenants. It’s The Price Is Right but twisted (higher...Higher!...HIGHER!!!!) as letting agents see how brazenly they can ramp prices.

But now innovative cruel scourges scar the lives of already impoverished renters.

By which I mean scams like the dire and discredited ‘Rent to Let’. Here, owners let a property but someone (often without the owners knowledge and consent) sublets the flat or house, converting lounges and even landings into rooms.

It usually ends badly. Tenants frequently have their rent collected but not passed on to the owner, and if the ‘chief tenant’ disappears, their right to stay is suspect.

Now there’s yet another rent ramping problem: the incursion and rise of Air B n’ B. What used to be a friendly and informal arrangement where owners could let a spare room to travellers, is now used to rent out entire flats as what are, in effect, holiday apartments. Tenants have few rights, and rentiers have few responsibilities.

I’m not surprised. This used to be the case in Dovecot Towers, where many flats were rented out short term. Here however, this was as ‘hotel apartments’ and the practice caused severe problems for residents, with many stag parties etc disrupting life with no way of stopping them

Until that is I visited the office of one company, and asked innocently whether my friend’s hen night party could rent a flat. It might be a loud – they could be ‘boisterous’ – would it matter? ‘No – that’s fine’, came the reply.

Boom.

I explained I lived there, and that subletting was illegal (few owners knew that) and that they should stop. The agent’s face was a picture.

Now imagine that the only possibility of renting a home is fleeting, precarious and on a daily agreement. Or that you pay online and on arrival find your new ‘home’ is double booked. And you’re homeless.

I’ve always wondered what fresh hell inflicted on tenants will be the actual step too far. What will make us snap and storm the barricades with pitchforks. You know what? I think this is it.

http://rentergirl.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/dovecot-towers-is-fawlty.html

(You might have read I am ending Rentergirl soon. I will post a farewell piece.)

Secret Hidden Homelessness.

It’s a tragic, hideous, inevitable, and scandalous but sure and certain fact that homelessness is rising everywhere.

Paradoxically, the causes are both simple and complex: there is a straightforward lack of homes with scant new building, in some areas of high demand rents are rising and those on no/low pay (even anyone on moderate wages) can’t cover their rent. Then we have the tyranny of no fault and revenge evictions, coupled with both the bedroom tax and the benefit cap.

It all adds to desperate people with nowhere to live, and to councils without council housing to place even those in need. There’s more to this than the ultimate, abject misery of rooflessness. There are many vulnerable people who are just about clinging on by their fingertips to having a roof over their head, with many, varied groups who live under the constant threat of being turfed out; in constant danger having nowhere safe to go:

1. Adult children outstaying their welcome, certain that the next row or even disagreement could see them shown t he door.

2. People whose relationship is over, but who are stuck in one home when they cannot afford to separate and each find somewhere new to live.


3. Tenants aware that their rentier (or so-called ‘forced landlord’) who couldn’t sell when in negative equity is itching to sell up and give them notice asap. They might only discover this when people call to ‘view’ their home. They will be given two months notice.

4. Those who gratefully endure a punitive, grinding chain of perpetual sofa-surfing, house-sitting, returning to stay with family at weekends or when work is slow and bleak, but who cannot present to local authorities as homeless due to having no local connection or insufficient ‘priority need.’


5. Homeowners who are behind with the mortgage, and who try so hard to keep up with agreements to pay the backlog but who are just not earning enough. They will wait until the day the bailiffs arrive and the stress is crippling.

6. Those who know they can be bedroom-taxed when their adult child leaves home, but who can’t downsize.

7. Tenants in areas of high demand (especially London) who read property sites in terror, bracing themselves for the horrendous rises in rents and house prices, keenly aware that their home is not a home but an asset to be sold on to the highest bidder whenever possible. There is no such thing as a sitting tenant in these circumstances anymore. They’ll be out in two months.


8. People who work on short term contracts with insecure jobs and low precarious pay, who know that few bad weeks will put them behind.

They’re not quite homeless. Not yet homeless. Not yet out on the street. But inevitably they will be out. A home is a right not a privilege. So just imagine how difficult daily life is, for the worried people who make up this enormous social group: pity the soon to be homeless.

http://rentergirl.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/how-to-be-homeless.html