How do we fix the housing crisis? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series, in which our writers share their experiences of the UK’s dysfunctional housing system and examine how we can fix it.
The scandal of England’s one million empty homes
The UK’s new rental scandal that no one is talking about
How the van-life generation made homelessness into an aesthetic
The ‘spinster’ housing crisis can no longer be ignored
Mid-life rug-pulls tend to come from behind, I’ve noticed. It’s often a stage of life that feels like a rollercoaster you didn’t mean to get on, full of shocks you weren’t expecting.
Just ask the men and women in their fifties and sixties who are slipping into housing insecurity. Or, let’s be clear, homelessness. Staying with friends, living out of suitcases: homeless in a way that you don’t see on the street, but homeless, nonetheless.
They are middle-aged people with careers behind and in front of them, families, decent CVs, respectable lives. People who, after a break-up, an eviction, a rent rise, or a spell of unstable work, have found themselves house-sitting, sleeping in the garage, living out of bags, or relying on favours.
As the founder of Silver Magazine, an online publication for over-50s, I see a lot of our followers’ chatter across our platforms, and this issue appears to be more widespread than official data suggests. And if you think it can’t happen to you, think again. I myself have been served a Section 21 no-fault eviction notice before, and it’s terrifying.
National homeless charity Crisis now estimates that 208,600 households across Great Britain are experiencing hidden homelessness, such as sofa surfing or sleeping in cars, vans, and sheds.
But it’s this specific version of it – mature, often middle-class people who do not fit the usual stereotype – that is perhaps most surprising. So many people are only one housing shock away from losing their footing. I’ve noticed how often housing conversations among my peers now often carry a note of fear. Not about climbing the ladder, but about staying on it at all.
I spoke to Nicholas Lezard, 62, a journalist who first found himself homeless at 44 after a marriage breakdown. “It was extremely distressing, enough for me to start looking up ‘monasteries’ on the internet. I licked my wounds in a friend’s farmhouse in North Devon while my friend and his family were on holiday.”
Lezard later found a flat in London at a manageable rent, but it was only manageable because the tenant was subletting it to him illegally. Once the owners found out, he was unceremoniously dispatched, and became homeless again.
What followed will sound horribly familiar to anyone who has ever tried to patch together a life whilst relying on the good will of friends: sofas, spare rooms, temporary arrangements that are never really “home”. He lived in a barely habitable, freezing cold lodge house in Scotland based on an estate owned by a friend for a year. “Then,” he says, “more couch-surfing; I cannot tell you how miserable that is. And now I have somewhere small but normal – a flat in Brighton with a sea view. I’ve lived here nearly six years.”
Lezard has written about this a lot, particularly in his Down and Out column for The New Statesman. Does he feel settled now? Not really, he says. “What stayed with me most was not just the chaos of it, but the emotional damage. The feeling of insecurity will never leave me. I still haven’t put any artwork on my walls, because I never know when I will have to leave again.”
Whilst a relationship breakdown was at the root of Lezard’s homelessness, for author Katy Evans-Bush, a huge rent-increase in her fifties left her unable to keep a roof over her head.
She lost her flat in London in 2018 to a £485pcm rent increase, taking a manageable £1,100 monthly rent to nearly £1,600. “The landlords wrote with five weeks’ notice,” she says. “It had been our family home [for years]. I had lost my job as a comms officer at a not-for-profit in the Tory cuts in 2011, and had hung on by the skin of my teeth as a freelancer. But I had no savings. And having no job means no way of renting a new flat. So I sold, chucked, or gave away everything I possibly could, put what was left into a lock-up garage, and went sofa-surfing and pet-sitting.”
Evans-Bush also highlights how appalling the experience was. “It was awful! Friends were very kind, and I never had to sleep on the street – but there comes a point when you’ve asked your full quota of favours. I felt I had more in common with the people on the street than with my own friends, from whom I felt completely estranged by this circumstance, who still had their houses, and beds, and partners, and pets, and desks.
“I could see in the shop windows that I didn’t look like the people on the streets, that I looked like an everyday person [with my bags], perhaps going on holiday. But that made me feel ridiculous. Contemptible. It took a long time to get over that.”
The Renters’ Rights Act came into effect on 1 May, and this promises more security on paper. The end of Section 21 no-fault evictions, limits on rent rises, and stronger repair obligations should give tenants greater stability and protection. But for the growing number of hidden homeless, those gains risk being blunted by the reality of today’s rental market.
For anyone trying to rent, the odds are really stacked. Most estate agencies will want you to be employed, and to earn three times the value of the rent payable. There will also be references to take out, and credit checks to pass. Not only is this an insanely restrictive system, rents are eye-wateringly high, and Local Housing Allowance rent allocations aren’t even coming close to covering the cost.
We talk as if the housing crisis belongs only to the young, or only to the visibly destitute. But a lot of people in mid-life are in far more precarious positions than they look. You try to rent again and discover that letting agents want stable employment, pristine paperwork, strong references, a hefty deposit and an income that neatly fits their formula. If your life has gone even slightly off-piste, the market has very little mercy.
Both Nick and Katy ultimately found places they can call home. Nick had some advice from an accountant, a grant from the Royal Literary Fund, and armed with this was able to negotiate the rental contract on his flat in Brighton. Prior to that he’d had over two decades of insecure living arrangements.
After months of homelessness Katy applied for and received an arts grant, which enabled her in 2019 to secure a one-bedroom flat in Kent where she is still settled. They both acknowledge that they are among the lucky ones, although both still carry the emotional scars and hollow insecurity that comes from this experience.