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Renting in the UK is awful and no one in their right mind would choose to do it long-term.<\/p>\n
To me, these are irrefutable facts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You have to contend with landlords who act like they\u2019re doing you a favour by taking a third of your income, rather like a tapeworm popping its head out of you and demanding kudos for your mineral deficiencies.<\/p>\n
You have to deal with estate agents and property managers, who are the least capable people I have ever met in my entire life \u2013 and I\u2019ve genuinely met a professional farter.<\/p>\n
Then you have no guarantee you\u2019ll be able to stay in your abode long-term and you often don\u2019t even have permission to put up a simple poster, which is something prison officers even permitted at Shawshank. Every day you work hard for the privilege of paying off someone else\u2019s mortgage.<\/p>\n
Right now, depressing as it sounds, the most likely chance of me or many of my generation \u2013 I\u2019m 30 \u2013 owning any assets, or scrap of a house, is when our parents die.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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They were playing an entirely different game when they got on the property ladder, even if they had low-paying jobs. My father was a ground worker and my mother worked in retail when they bought their first house, but they could still own one.<\/p>\n
They\u2019ve since separated, so when they pass on, I\u2019ll get half of two houses. That\u2019s because \u2013 unluckily \u2013 I have a sister, but if I also outlive her, I\u2019ll be living high on the hog of inherited assets. And what a hog.<\/p>\n
Does even projecting about my parents\u2019 death sound callous? Well, it feels like I\u2019ve been forced into thinking about the prospect and how life will change after it. But I\u2019m not happy about it.<\/p>\n
My show at the Edinburgh Fringe this year is a jaunty hour about how much I hate myself, including why this line of thinking doesn\u2019t help.<\/p>\n
If a third of your income is going to a landlord, you simply do not have enough money to live a reasonable quality of life and put money aside for a future house deposit (especially in a cost of living crisis).<\/p>\n
Platform is the home of Metro.co.uk’s first-person and opinion pieces, devoted to giving a platform to underheard and underrepresented voices in the media. <\/strong><\/p>\n Find some of our best reads of the week below:<\/p>\n An anonymous writer describes her experience of cutting her alcoholic mum out of her life – and why she still sends her presents despite the pain. <\/p>\n Emma Flint recently discovered the term ‘abrosexual’ and realised, after not having the right word to describe their sexuality for 30 years, that this one suited her perfectly. <\/p>\n Comedian Liam Withnail had just completed his second marathon when he fainted and pooed his pants. Assuming he was healthy, he was shocked to be diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. <\/p>\n And marketing manager Sabreena Dean shares her spot on response to the question, ‘But where are you really from?’. <\/p>\n In reality, you need to inherit assets \u2013 in the form of your parents\u2019 home, possessions and any wealth accrued during their lifetimes of hard work \u2013 to sell and combine into a deposit to get onto the property ladder. You\u2019re essentially handing over the souls of those who created the home you grew up in to gain your own.<\/p>\n I live in London, which is especially bad to rent in. Estimating using the average monthly rent I have paid across all the houses and flats I\u2019ve lived in, times by the number of years I\u2019ve lived in London, it has cost me 70k (aka a deposit) to live among maniacs, mice and mould (Hackney is vibrant).<\/p>\n While I believe the private renting system is inherently unethical and bad for the economy, there are those in the property industry who see it as a legitimate business. If you are one of those people \u2013 and you take your work seriously \u2013 I\u2019d like to address you directly now: You are absolutely terrible at your jobs.<\/p>\n Landlords, property managers and estate agents provide appalling service for an over-inflated charge and act like they\u2019re bending over backwards for us while failing to do the bare minimum. I don\u2019t make as much money as them, but I know that I am so much better at my job \u2013 and I am literally a clown\u00a0(I am a stand up comedian, which is like clown, but even more quietly horrifying).<\/p>\n Landlords also make it harder for anyone who wants to own property. Obviously, they extract an unreasonable amount of your monthly income, preventing you from building up any savings.<\/p>\n They\u2019re also part of a bigger picture, the housing crisis. A huge part of the crisis, however, is supply and demand. There is too much demand and not enough supply, so private and corporate landlords limit the supply for their own gain.<\/p>\n In the UK, we need to build approximately 5million homes to sort out the housing crisis, yet every government for the past 30 years has failed to build enough housing through a combination of ineptitude, quibbling over the land used and the fact too many MPs are landlords.<\/p>\n On top of that, according to Open Democracy\u2019s 2021 investigation, a quarter of Tories are landlords. It stated: \u2018In total, 115 (18%) MPs across all parties have declared earning money from rent, with Tories making up the vast majority. This compares to around 3% of the UK\u2019s adult population, meaning MPs are roughly six times more likely to be landlords.\u2019<\/p>\n Now, I\u2019m sorry for suggesting that we might want to set some ethical standards in public life, but I don\u2019t think it is acceptable to be an MP and a landlord. I believe that there are all manners of conflict of interest there, and this must change. It does somewhat explain why our leaders seemingly don\u2019t care about renters and aren\u2019t serious about housing.<\/p>\n But this is why the grim reality of the situation is that my generation often needs to rely on inheritance to get us on the property ladder.<\/p>\n Of course, I want my parents to flourish in retirement and enjoy every moment of it, so it brings me such dread and misery that I have to view their homes as my lifeboat away from the wreckage of the SS UK Rental Market (the only sunken ship no one wealthy would put themselves at risk to examine).<\/p>\n Housing is a hard situation for my generation. I hate that it\u2019s making us rely on the deaths of our relatives or that it\u2019s so insecure we all have to hoard familial wealth (if you can! Plenty can\u2019t!).<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to have to see them that way. This country is sliding back into feudalism, and it\u2019s bad for our economy and quality of life.<\/p>\n What kind of a life is it anyway, when so much of your future depends on death?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n