About £600 a month. That’s what I was paying back in 2020 for a room in a three-bedroom flat in Queen’s Road Peckham (Zone 2, no Tube). Admittedly, it didn’t have a living room and the bathroom was permanently green with mould – but on the plus side I had a personal balcony (read: awkward triangle of cement).
Once, I even woke up to my housemate traipsing back through the balcony door, having used my room as a pathway whilst I was dead to the world. I can tell you now that this sort of unwelcome early-hours intrusion is not something you forget quickly – though I had to forgive him as the poor guy had “nowhere else to go to smoke his zoot”.
Anyway five years later, I’m paying over £300 more than that per month, and I live just a few doors down from the Weed Crime Scene. My salary has increased a little, thank God, but has it gone up by 50%? No.
My room is only a little larger than a coffin in this new gaff, although I do have a pet in the form of a little mouse who has proved more sociable than at least one of my housemates – with an aptitude for acrobatics. Recently that means long jumping off the kitchen counter whenever I enter the room.
London rents have risen by 35 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic
I’m not alone and I know I have it better than many others in my generation (and of course, this is a very privileged complaint to make when you consider the increasing number of people in temporary accommodation or no housing at all due to this country’s housing crisis).
London rents have risen by 35 per cent since the beginning of the pandemic, as new data from property website Rightmove shows. Since 2020, real mean earnings for employees in London have increased by approximately 5%, and middle earners in London have seen a smaller increase of around 1.7%. Note the difference? Times really are hard. The gap between wages and rents growth in recent years has created an affordability gap of £720, according to Felicia Odamtten, an economist at the Resolution Foundation.
It’s really no wonder that nowadays I spend over half my salary on rent and bills, and I’m definitely not saving anything. My situation is not even wildly abnormal. The average London renter spends around 49% of their household income on rent, which is a figure considered unaffordable by official standards. It’s worse for recent grads, who earn on average between £32,000 and £38,000 (not all of them, though, surely - mine was £18k but I guess I chose the wrong profession).
I thought I’d come across a sweet deal, but it turned out another potential housemate was a heroin user
Anecdotally speaking, it is not uncommon for people to now be paying well over £1,200 a month for pretty crappy properties with weird flatmates in undesirable areas. Recently I went to have a look round a flat in north London. It seemed pretty sweet – nice housemates, reasonable sized room, functioning oven – until I found out another potential housemate was a heroin user.
Before you cry Gen Z moaning, this isn’t that. One in five privately rented homes in London don’t meet basic health and safety requirements, according to think tank the Centre for London, while 41% of Londoners have experienced mould in their homes. Gross. Often, it’s far worse than this (a full on ground floor flood, mushrooms growing in the toilets, a slug infestation, frost on the inside of windows and a partial roof implosion are all instances that spring to mind). Certain people I know live in what can only really be described as hovels rather than homes.
Some people are so desperate at this point that they are even jumping onto rat-infested canal boats, as my otherwise normal seeming colleague did, with disastrous consequences.
All this has been documented before. And whilst I don’t want to come across as whiney, in the last five years specifically, the effects of the rental crisis have now become cultural. A lack of disposable income is threatening the future of London’s social fabric.
People go out less, are generally stingy and fear for the future. People in their 30s are moving back in with their parents - which would be fine, except they usually don’t want to. Whilst it’s true that in general people are richer than they were decades ago – millennials and generation Zs still know they will be poorer than their parents.
For context, the salary-to-rent ratio was closer to 30% in the 1990s. My parents were able to buy a house in Clapham Junction at the age of 30. Doesn’t look like a chance in hell I’ll be doing the same.
On top of the rental crisis, the cost of living is so high it’s sucking up any remaining cash. The real costs of food, fuel and transport have skyrocketed. Supermarket prices are now predicted to have shot up by 40% from 2020 to 2025.
All this is not exactly a stimulating atmosphere for culture. In such a climate it’s hardly surprising nightclubs are at risk and pubs are closing at a rate of one per day. A lot of it is down to people simply not feeling they have the dosh to spend. We often don’t. So no wonder Londoners are swapping dancefloors for DMs.
Of course, there are also far more serious consequences of unaffordable housing than affluent yuppies’ disposable income and ability to pay for pints. Homelessness is rising, as people become unable to pay these sky high rents – there was an eight per cent increase in homelessness in the year to 2025 as well as a big jump in people in work who are without a home.
Is the future doomed? To fix this godforsaken mess, the government needs to increase the supply of homes. It needs to build more homes – without ditching social housing requirements. But it has known this for a long time and the early signs of the Labour government are frankly not promising. The situation does not look like it will be resolving anytime soon.
I’m no longer living with the bedroom-invading weed smoker – he has fled to Manchester, where rents are just a little more bearable (though rising rapidly). I, however, feel my fate is tied to this wretched city. Sigh.
Lucy Kenningham is Comment Editor at The Standard
