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.
I’m an 82-year-old economist – here’s why I’ll never downsizeThe homes that should never be soldThe UK’s new rental scandal that no one is talking about
In the summer of 2011, I lived in what’s generally known as a property guardian scheme, nestled between Great Eastern Street and the City of London. It was a three-storey red-brick office block with a litter-strewn loading bay and a vast basement, housing artists, hospitality workers and others on unreliable incomes.
While the facilities were wanting, to say the least (the hanging wires, the windowless rooms, the shower unit in an entirely different building), it cost me £250 a month and fulfilled its role as a cheap, bohemian kind of living situation – a flawed solution to London’s burgeoning housing crisis. The only hurdle was the raves that would occasionally take place in the basement.
But a decade and a half later, property guardianships are a very different prospect. While chaos and neglect are generally considered par for the course in such an arrangement, monthly payments for guardian schemes are now creeping closer towards rental prices in many areas.
