Over the past decade, Saf Mustafa has packed her bags and moved house a dozen times, never by choice. Marco Paris is clinging on to his home by the skin of his teeth but fears eviction could come at any moment. And Alisha Clarke is feeling the strain of raising a young family in temporary accommodation.
As all of them know, life at the sharp end of London’s housing crisis is getting bleaker by the day. Rough sleeping, reports Crisis, has become normalised. London Councils says 90,000 children live in temporary accommodation. And housebuilding, a vital component in easing the crisis, is in freefall. Private house building has plummeted 84 per cent, down from 33,782 new homes in 2016 to 5,547 last year, according to residential development analyst Molior.
Little wonder that, following a wave of protests across the globe, a national housing demonstration will be staged in London on April 18. Dozens of pressure groups, from the London Renters union to the CND, are calling for urgent action, including rent controls and more investment in new council housing.
Alisha Clarke knows how desperately London needs more social housing. After almost seven years in temporary accommodation she has discovered the price to pay for a roof over her head is complete powerlessness within a system which often seems to lack any common sense.
The 29-year-old, originally from Catford, was living with her mother when she had her first two children, now aged 12 and seven. In 2019, with her family home bursting at the seams, she applied to Lewisham council for help with housing and was offered a short-term place at a mother-and-baby unit in Sydenham. From there she was moved to a two-bedroom flat in New Cross, where she lived for seven years and had two more children, now aged seven and five. The situation with their father is difficult and at present there is no contact with him.
Last November, out of the blue, the council contacted Clarke and informed her that since the flat was overcrowded she was to be moved to a three-bedroom one, this time in Tooting, eight miles away. If she declined the offer, said the council, she would be evicted. “I had nowhere else to go,” she says.
Settling into Tooting has been difficult. “I have no friends or family, no support from anyone,” she says. There have also been a whole raft of unforeseen practical problems. Clarke didn’t want to make her children move school, which means she spends about four hours a day escorting them back and forth to New Cross. This means setting her alarm for 6am and getting four young children up, washed, dressed and breakfasted. These early starts are tough on everyone.
“The children are tired and fall asleep in class, or they are just miserable and have no energy,” Clarke says. “They want to go to the park with their friends after school and we can’t because we have to get home, and they are very upset about that.” Worse, when buses and trains let her down, the children arrive late for class. The school is now threatening legal action because of their attendance.
“I have no friends or family, no support from anyone”
The move has also caused a dispute over Clarke’s cats, which she bought when there was a mouse infestation in her New Cross flat. They became much-loved members of the family. Her new home does not allow pets — something she was unaware of before the move — and the council is pressuring her to rehome them.
The rent on her three-bedroom flat is £500 per week, more than the housing benefit she is eligible for, which means she must somehow find money to pay the shortfall or risk eviction.
Clarke is on the council’s waiting list for permanent accommodation, but after all these years there is still no sign of a home for her family. She has contacted her local MP about her plight, but has had no assistance. “The whole dynamic has really put me sort of at a loss,” says Clarke, who is expecting her fifth child in August. “It really is very stressful.”
A spokeswoman for Lewisham council said that its policy was to use temporary accommodation as close as possible to the borough. “But, due to a severe shortage of affordable housing and more than 2,400 households needing this support, this is not always possible,” she says. “We recognise some placements are not ideal. In this instance the council secured the best available option.”
As a private renter it would be reasonable to expect that Saf Mustafa has control over her own life. Not so. She moved to London for university and over the past decade she has bounced around, moving home 12 times. “It would be things like the landlord wanting to put the rent up, or me subletting and the lease coming to an end,” she explains. “Some years I have moved three or four times and I don’t think it has ever been my choice.”
Her current home is a flat in Forest Hill shared with three friends. The rent, split four ways, comes in at £1,950pcm, with bills on top of that. Affordability-wise, the 30-year-old knows she has a good deal, although rent still takes a big chunk of the money she earns as an environmental researcher and part-time waitress. But in terms of liveability the property leaves much to be desired. “It is a big old house which has been made into flats, and there is damp and mould throughout,” she says. “The landlord has got people living at the end of the garden and there have been mice.”
“The landlord has got people living at the end of the garden”
Right now they are delicately trying to get the landlord to do something about the electricity supply — for reasons Mustafa doesn’t fully understand the bill for the ground-floor flat is being charged to the first-floor tenants. “If we put too much pressure he threatens to evict us,” Mustafa claims. “If you are renting you have always got this balance of deciding whether to ask for something to be fixed and what the cost could be if you do.”
In theory she would love to own her own place and put down roots. “But I am not in a position to ever even imagine it,” she says “What I would like now is just the chance to rent securely and not be at risk of being kicked out.”
Next month, Marco Paris will be celebrating 20 years of living in London — although in bricks and mortar terms he has little to show for his two decades in the capital. Just like Mustafa, he has moved from rental to rental, unable to scrape together a deposit to buy a place of his own. Paris, who manages a showroom for an Italian outdoor furniture company, is now stuck in a precarious and unsustainable trap.
He has been living in a one-bedroom flat in Harrow-on-the-Hill for about five years. When he moved in, the property cost him £950pcm plus bills, but his landlord has demanded hefty annual increases that Paris simply cannot afford. He has argued his case every year and, after a series of fractious negotiations — with threats of legal action on both sides — has managed, with the help of community union Acorn, to keep his rent at £1,200pcm. “My situation does not feel safe,” he says. “I don’t have a contract, they could come back at any time asking for another increase. It is not the right way to live — I feel on the edge.”
Financial experts agree people should spend about a third of their take-home pay on housing costs. Paris estimates he is paying more like 60 per cent. “I understand market rents are what they are, but they are set by landlords and agents and we are forced to accept them, or be evicted,” he says. “It is like blackmail.”
“My situation does not feel safe”
Paris has, of course, explored alternative housing options but struggled to find anywhere cheaper, other than flat shares or houses in multiple occupation. At 55 he feels too old to move into a shared home and he hates the idea of being cooped up in a single room in a house full of strangers. So he is staying put, and keeping his fingers crossed his landlord won’t use the terms of the new Renters’ Rights Act as a reason to hike his rent. Little luxuries like a coffee are already out of the question for Paris, who has a hard enough time paying for everyday essentials. “It is not life,” he says.
