RenterGirl, winner of Best New Blog in this year's Manchester Blog awards, lives in 'Dovecot Towers' - so called because tenants are packed together like pigeons. She tells a story of a dilemma most people in big cities in the UK would recognise: house prices are out of her range but she doesn't qualify for social housing, so she makes do with her one-bedroom rented new-build with small cupboards and thin walls.
Low-quality apartments, owned by buy-to-let investors, often have more time spent on their marketing than actual construction and fitting. The furnishings are bought in bulk: for instance, RenterGirl doesn't have a bathroom cabinet, because it is deemed 'non-essential'. With so little room, it's little wonder that a major urban growth industry is self-storage units:
I crave a basement, or an attic. I can actually get quite wistful; just imagine, no boxes, nothing strewn around your home. I would spend time in that basement. I would love it, as it deserves to be loved. In fact I'd worship it like a god. I would install a shrine dedicated to: 'Stuff'.Without cupboards, you can't economise and buy in bulk - even a bargain bumper pack of toilet roll is a major space devouring purchase, stored by necessity in the lounge, which is inconvenient in so many ways.
Space isn't the only problem. Over the past eight months, she has eloquently told tales of bad noise insulation, erosion of community, and even a brothel servicing clients in the stairwell.
RenterGirl's main beef is with landlords. As with many tenants, she feels stuck in a financial trap, unable to save and having to plan around the end of her leasing contracts. She wants to move, but can't quite bring herself to go through the pain. In any case, she would probably only be moving into an identical buy-to-let shoebox with a financially overextended owner:
The flats are over abundant, and rotten. Many financial novices believed they had discovered an opportunity to get rich quick, and if banks were unsupportive of their ambitions, they even borrowed money from family, who will also be hit.How will it affect me? I can't avoid it, and I don't even own my flat: I just live in the type of property that's ripe for a tumble. Buy to let newbuilds in areas crammed with more of the same might plummet in price, bankrupting the owners.
Despite forecasts of a housing crash, the view from her window is of cranes, probably building more carbon copies of Dovecot Towers. As cities get larger, more people get caught in the same no-assistance but no-mortgage quandary as she is.
People speak of buy to let tenants as is if we are all 'yuppies' (do people still say that?) or trust funded wastrels with pots of money carelessly oozing away, when we should invest in property. The truth is simple: we aren't rich, and just need a home.
Is this a growing social problem, or should RenterGirl be grateful she has a roof over her head at all?
