Daisy Lafarge
Rents a one-bed flat with her boyfriend in Glasgow
Daisy Lafarge, 31, was born in Hastings and studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Her debut novel Paul (2021) won a Betty Trask award, and her poetry collection Life Without Air was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize
I remember the exact moment I first understood the concept of rent. I was six years old and in the local Safeway with my mum. It was a weekday evening – unusual, since we always did the weekly shop on a Saturday – but the childminder she’d just picked me up from had a policy of only providing snacks, not dinner, and I must have been hungry. I can’t remember how the topic of rent came up. Maybe I asked for something off the shelf and my mum said something like, how will we pay the rent if we buy things like that? Or maybe I’d got wind of a difference between us and people who owned their own homes, or maybe she’d alluded to something about us not being able to stay in the flat we were living in, which alarmed me. I was sensitive to instability: due to her teenage pregnancy and some chaotic family dynamics, I had experienced a lot of disruption by the age of six, already on my second school and close to moving on to a third.
To my mind, renting was the same as borrowing. I said something like: but if we had to leave this flat it would be OK because then you’d get all the rent back and we could rent somewhere else. She looked at me like I was an alien – what planet was I living on? This was a common experience, since we were not so far apart in age and she often seemed surprised that I did not already know the things she knew – that I was in fact a child. She explained that you don’t get rent back – you give it to the people who own the property and once it’s gone it’s gone for ever. I distinctly remember the cognitive strain of trying to wrap my head around something so obviously, glaringly wrong. So the people who can afford to buy houses get to keep them and make money, I said, but the people who can’t afford to buy them don’t get to keep anything? That’s right, she replied without elaborating. She was a young single mother in the 90s, and not immune to the vilification of people like her by politicians and the culture at large, which had estranged her – us – from the forms of solidarity that we desperately needed. She was not a socialist, but that moment in the supermarket was when I became one, although I couldn’t articulate it at the time.
Some of the situations we found ourselves in had an almost Dickensian quality, including a pseudo-benevolent estate agent who took pity and found us a far nicer flat than we could afford at a knock-off rate. Another flat was accessed via a communal staircase above a pet shop which always stank of hamster bedding – its faint, ureal scent is my Proustian madeleine. In that flat we had a revolving cast of subletters, including an Irish witch called Mary, who several years later turned up on Big Brother 6. I recollect all this not because it was grim – we were often lucky, a lot luckier than many – but because it is difficult to write about my experience of renting as an adult and a writer without the context of how renting has structured my entire life. Like many millennial state-school high achievers, I was able to get to university thanks to the Education Maintenance Allowance during my A-levels (scrapped in 2011) and qualifying for the maximum means-tested maintenance grant (scrapped in 2016). I was the last year to enrol before tuition fees tripled; I also chose to study in Scotland because at that time a Scottish degree was half the price of an English one. I narrowly dodged these bullets of austerity, but I still have tens of thousands in student debt that I’m unlikely to ever be able to repay.
Nearly 12 years after moving to Scotland to study, I still live here. While friends at university went home during the holidays, I stayed here to rent, and when we all graduated I continued to do so. It was surreal to watch some of them become homeowners before my mum was finally able to. After a string of moderately exploitative landlords (including one who – really – turned out to be an arms dealer) and in spite of eye-watering rent hikes across Scotland, I got lucky with my current situation. I’ve just marked a whole calendar year in this flat, something I’ve only managed on one other occasion since leaving home at 18. For the time being – since renting is, at core, a precarious relationship to time – I am able to live here without having to take on so much work that I don’t have energy for friends or the downtime I need to manage a chronic illness. Doing what I want to do – which is write – as someone who can’t rely on family wealth or a break at their parent’s when they need it, feels just about possible here, for now.
But this affordability comes at the cost of career what-ifs: what if I were the kind of writer whose parents bought them a flat in London, or one who was able to better focus on writing because the precarity of renting was only a temporary prelude to the balm of inheritance? What if I could afford to network all the time, would I be a better writer, or at least be able to sell a book for more than a few months’ rent? Last year’s statistics from the Society of Authors were dire – the average annual income for professional authors has dropped to £7,000 – a 43% decline since 2007, with women and writers of colour worst affected. The cost of living crisis, combined with dwindling funding, means that writers who can’t rely on existing wealth are getting squeezed out. In an article for The Author, novelist Heather Parry tackled the question “Why doesn’t Scotland have a Sally Rooney?”. Compared with Ireland’s funding landscape, Parry likened Scotland’s to The Hunger Games; the Scottish Sally still hasn’t finished her book due to insubstantial funding.
This bitterness is only useful to me in so far as I’m able to get a grip and redirect it. I don’t want a record-breaking book deal; I want universal basic income. I’m a member of Living Rent, Scotland’s tenants union, and along with dozens of its members I contributed a testimony that was used to help secure a six-month rent freeze from the Scottish government. I try, whenever I’m able, to support The Poets’ Hardship Fund, which provides a lifeline to poets in dire financial circumstances without forcing them through a punitive application process. These are admittedly small-scale, donation-reliant gestures – as the fund puts it: “The scale of what we’re dealing with far exceeds any of our individual capacities for making change.” But I often think how different things might have been for me and my mum had we experienced similar gestures of solidarity. Do I miss out by not being a London-based author? Undoubtedly – but I’d rather have a social life that isn’t structured by constant hustle and competition. I’m too tired for that. I’ve been renting a long time.
Okechukwu Nzelu
About to buy his first flat, Manchester
Born in 1988, Okechukwu Nzelu was the recipient of a Northern Writers’ award from New Writing North in 2015. His debut novel, The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney (2019), won a Betty Trask award; his second novel Here Again Now was published in 2022. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Lancaster University
This month, I did the unthinkable: I had dinner with my neighbours. This might sound like an unremarkable way to spend an evening, but for many of us, the role of a neighbour is strict. A neighbour looks after your parcels while you’re out; is someone who you both know has heard you having sex; often, someone whose name you forgot so long ago it would be rude to ask. Voluntarily socialising with such a person represents a foray into unknown territory.
It took me years to approach this frontier. Growing up in the north-west as a family of immigrants and their children, we were often the only Black people on the street. I never felt part of the fabric. I remember being at primary school in Bolton, where someone in my class asked me if my skin would turn white if I washed it long enough. Relationships in which neighbours lent and borrowed cups of flour or chatted over a fence only happened on TV. I lived in my current flat for five years before I broke bread with the people I see every day by the postbox.
And now, just when I’m starting to feel comfortable, I’m leaving. After years of saving (and what feels like years of flat-hunting but what is closer to 12 months), I’m getting ready to (hopefully, potentially) buy somewhere for myself and move in. The new place will be in a different neighbourhood, in a different part of town, because although the part of Manchester in which I currently live is just about affordable for me to rent in, it’s too expensive to buy.
And buy I must, apparently. There are lots of reasons to want to own your own home, but for me, it’s the sense of permanence and control that matter most. I’ve moved countless times in my life: when I was a child, we moved around many times for reasons I still don’t entirely understand. I went to four different primary schools and I grew to hate moving, so much so that even now, as an adult, part of me relishes having a slightly untidy flat because I associate tidiness with the stressful days before a move. Home ownership means not having to leave until you’re ready.
And there is something very English about this state of affairs. A friend of mine who lives in Berlin rented very happily for many years because Germany guarantees its renters more rights over where they live, meaning it takes longer to evict tenants who’ve settled in and done nothing wrong. The English rental market, by comparison, is chaotically unregulated, which only makes ownership all the more desirable, which in turn makes it more competitive, which in turn makes renting more of a necessity for many people. This is capitalism at work, weaving its dark magic, perpetuating its own difficulties. And it irks me because it demands so much and offers so little in return. Buying a home is the best way to guarantee security. And yet, no matter how much of a struggle buying might be, any security this offers is meagre. House prices can fall, interest rates can rise. You might find yourself with neighbours who aren’t so friendly.
In this light, buying seems like more of a risk than renting, because the investment – both personal and financial – is greater. Where I’m moving to, I’ll have new neighbours, and while I’m grateful for this new chapter in my life that I never expected to begin, I’ll also be very sad to leave. I’ll miss where I live now: the lovely park, the beautiful architecture, the low rent. I’ll also miss that hard-won feeling of being, ever so slightly, a part of something. In the context of what I’m giving up, buying feels like a gamble, even if I am grateful to be able to play at all.
But it’s odd that I should have worked so hard to get to this point. For a while I took on every freelance gig I could get, while working full-time in various day jobs, exhausting myself in order to save up for a deposit I knew I would never inherit. I am lucky to write, and I love all the work I do, but the sheer amount of time, work and sacrifice required for an artist to buy a home by themselves without the privilege of any major financial assistance is a disgrace. And bizarrely, it is a disgrace which is not even achievable for everyone, because many people who work in the arts are unable to afford to reach the first rung on a property ladder that can feel stubbornly out of reach.
And it’s getting worse. House-hunting was a wake-up call to how Manchester is changing. Years ago, one Londoner friend described his experience as “growing up in a city you can’t afford to live in”, and my heart broke for him because I naively assumed my life would be different. It’s not that different. London may enjoy far greater levels of investment than the north-west, but I always used to feel grateful for the affordability of things at home in Manchester. When I started looking for somewhere to buy, I lost that sense of gratitude: in December 2022, Manchester’s house prices were nearly 15% higher than December 2021. During the post-lockdown market boom, it was easy to miss out on seeing a property (even in areas of Manchester that are less sought after) if you didn’t contact the estate agent within a few minutes of the listing going live. Maybe if things were different, I’d be able to buy somewhere in the neighbourhood I’ve come to know and love.
So I worry. And surely no homeowner is more worried than the first-timer on the brink of signing away their life (why do we still use the word “mortgage”, anyway? Surely in the last few hundred years something more cuddly than “dead pledge” has come on the market?). I worry about surveys, wiring, plumbing. I worry about giving up a good thing I enjoy in exchange for an ultimately unknowable thing I will own and for which I will be responsible. The prospect of home ownership, like so much of adult life, is full of uncertainty. And then I remember that it was always like this: four primary schools. Rising rents. Unregulated landlords.
This is what I tell myself when I worry about the big leap that is first-time buying. And I tell myself that even if I have to sit on cardboard boxes for months before I can afford a sofa to call my own, what I will have will be mine. I tell myself I’ll make new friends with new neighbours in a new part of town. I look at the numbers. And when I think about what it’s all worth, I hope I’ll get to decide some of that myself.
Amber Medland
Renting a one-bed flat with her boyfriend, south London
Amber Medland, 32, studied at Cambridge and Columbia University. Her debut novel Wild Pets was published by Faber in 2021. Since then, she has written for various publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review and the London Review of Books.
One of the fervent pleas I made to the universe during my 20s was for just one thing to remain constant. If either my environment or relationships felt unstable, I couldn’t write. Unfortunately, my ex-boyfriend was an artist. By the time I entered the London rental market, I’d learned that I couldn’t afford for either my creativity or mental health to depend on the external world not changing. After seven years of dealing with private landlords in London, I’ve learned to tolerate uncertainty.
The first landlord was a close friend. I rented a room in his Hackney flat for “mates rates”. I was happy there, but I still felt like a guest in his home. To write, I have to forget that other people exist. I have to keep my noise-cancelling headphones on at all hours and feel free to roam around muttering. Even between friends, the power dynamic between tenant and landlord is asymmetrical. Out of discomfort at barely making the reduced rent I once jokingly called my generous friend a “land baron”. Fortunately, it didn’t stick.
When I found out that rent should be one-third of your salary, I laughed. My second tenancy – a box room in Stockwell – cost three-quarters of mine. My mattress took up most of the floor, but it was spring and the magnolia tree outside made the realities of subletting seem irrelevant, until three months later, when the legal tenant abruptly wanted his room back. I considered becoming a property guardian, but they can evict at short notice. Eventually, I found a flat share in a converted chapel in Brixton with a few close friends. My room was like a stage set, with purple walls and skylights. I wrangled a deal with the landlord and brought in an extra tenant from Spare Room (“the Spare”) so we could afford the rent. In doing so, I became dependent on both the true landlord (“the Overlord”) and the man in the room below who didn’t like me much. He kept taking his bike apart in the living room. He got into fermentation.
Living with a rotating cast of six people felt like living in a kaleidoscope. I inhabited a paradox: I loved my chosen housemates dearly, but often wanted them all to go away. It changed how I wrote. I’d wondered before whether writing in bars and on trains affected my style, whether all these liminal spaces made my writing ephemeral, flimsy and wholly without plot. I’d blamed the lack of space that felt like mine for the journals full of fragments which didn’t cohere. In the house share, privacy didn’t exist. In my room, there was a gap between the floorboard and the wall; I could hear every blip of the Spare’s alarm. It was one of the better sounds shared.
Writing had to compete with people yelling up the stairs and the obligation to do small talk with overnight guests in the kitchen. But knowing that there was only an hour to work on my first novel before the others clattered home motivated me, as did knowing someone would listen to me lie on the floor and complain afterwards. Being able to hear people talking constantly is good training for writing dialogue. The Overlord liked the idea of housing a writer and didn’t mind the few times my rent was late. The cost of his quick if suspiciously cheap repairs was your attention. He’d repair anything as long as he could explain to you precisely what he was doing as you watched him work.
I started making notes for my second novel about shared living, stashing away all the petty grievances. Just as I became frustrated by the chaos, I got on to the London Library’s Emerging Writers programme and finally claimed a desk which was (to my mind anyway) mine. On the bus home, I scrolled Spare Room listings for studio flats hungrily. I found one I could afford, then realised it was a parking space.
Now, I live with my boyfriend in a one-bedroom flat in Brixton. Part of me likes the impermanence of renting – the finality of a “forever home” terrifies me – but at times the uncertainty has produced a crackle of anxiety which makes work impossible, like trying to sing with a head full of bees.
Figuring out how to write regardless of the fact that the home which I have poured love, time and money into is not in fact “mine” is painful. For example, I have to mull whether telling you about my landlord ringing the buzzer and yelling, “Hey, it’s big daddy, are you naked?” while my boyfriend was on a work call endangers our fragile tenancy. After we moved in he mentioned casually that he was selling the flat and would be showing people around. That was three years ago. I freaked out before the first viewing and calmed down around the 20th. As it turns out, selling a flat during a pandemic and a cost of living crisis isn’t easy. If I had lost my nerve and we’d moved immediately, I’d have lost out on so much time in a place which feels like home – regardless of the deed – and I wouldn’t have sold my first nonfiction book, Attention Seeker: The Truth About ADHD.
Fretting about my rental seems futile – as pointless as thinking about applying for a mortgage, when the prospect of raising the deposit is laughable. The only people I know who own flats in London without significant input from their parents work in finance or devised creative shared-ownership setups. One novelist friend got her advance and immediately paid for a year’s rent upfront, but that’s about as much permanence as writers get, and such advances are rare. The rental system is rigged against writers, who like many others are often in part-time work or juggling an array of freelance gigs. Nobody can afford to be a writer; it makes no financial sense. But then, nor does renting.
Rather than fixating on things that are beyond my control, such as the fact that, like most of my generation, I pay rent and therefore have no savings, I shift my attention. In every temporary home, I’ve had the quote from Flaubert on my wall: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and creative in your work.” What I care about most is owning my time and using it to make solid things which are in themselves constant. When I was living with six people, I dreamed about living alone. Now I fantasise about running a mad, old-school boarding house for writers, freeing them to write without the nagging drone of rent, with a sinking fund for dinners. Or even better, living in one.
Michael Magee
Preparing for eviction from his rented house, Belfast
Michael Magee’s debut novel Close to Home was published earlier this month by Hamish Hamilton. The author, 33, gained a PhD in creative writing from Queen’s University, Belfast and he is the fiction editor of The Tangerine, a Belfast-based magazine of new writing. His work has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat and The 32: An Anthology of Working Class Writing
It started as it does for most people, when I was a student. That move from overpriced halls in Liverpool city centre to private rentals. For the first few weeks, everything was grand. Then that fresh coat of paint I smelled when we first moved in started to darken at the corners. The walls began to sweat.
At the time, I thought living in these conditions was part and parcel. That’s student life, isn’t it? Inhaling damp. Laying mouse traps. Pulling your bed away from the wall because the mould has spread on to your pillow. Sure we’ve all been there. We’ve all had to go to the doctor because we’ve developed a cough that won’t go away. That happened to my housemate. His room was worse than any I’d ever seen: the walls were black from floor to ceiling. His clothes were ruined, and when he complained the landlord told him to open the windows. Then the boiler broke.
This was during the cold snap in 2010. There were blizzards outside and we were huddled around halogen heaters wrapped in layers of clothes. It took the landlord weeks to get it sorted. I’m talking no heating, no hot water; we had to fill the bathroom sink with boiled water from the kettle to wash ourselves. At one point, we thought about lighting a fire in the middle of the living room; we were that desperate. The landlord didn’t care. We were only there until the next batch of students came along, and there were plenty of students. We saw them queueing around the block for houses in worse condition than ours. That made us expendable. Complain all we want, refuse to pay rent even. We could be replaced in a matter of weeks.
Things were no better when I came back to Belfast. I moved into a house share and ended up in a poorly insulated room that was part of an extension built onto the back. It was built cheaply and became so cold during the winter that I begged the landlord to let me move into another room, but I had to pay an extra £50 a month for it. It was essentially the same room but part of the actual house, yet the landlord couldn’t miss the opportunity to rinse me of more money I couldn’t afford, just because he could. Three months later I was told I had to leave the property. The landlord was selling up and I had to rely on a reference from him to secure a new lease. If you don’t have a reference, or if you’re given a bad one, you’re out of luck.
No wonder people are reluctant to kick up a fuss. They’re afraid of what it might cost them, and landlords can be scary. Most of them come from affluent backgrounds, they carry the cultural markers associated with power and authority, and they exercise this authority in all sorts of ways. I have one friend, a young woman, whose landlord would show up at her house at least once a month, completely unannounced. He would go from room to room pointing things out that needed to be cleaned, then warn them he would be back the next day to make sure the work was done. This was a house of four women in their early 20s, and he had no qualms about opening doors and walking into their bedrooms, both while they were there and while they were away. “This space isn’t your space,” he seemed to say. “It’s mine and I can intrude upon it any time I want.”
This feeling of the space not being yours is deepened when you’re struggling to make rent every month. All through my 20s, I worked in insecure service-industry jobs that didn’t pay a lot, whole shifts with one 20-minute break. I was constantly on my feet, and if I couldn’t hack it, I could leave, no bother to them; there were plenty of people waiting to replace me. There were times when it was touch and go, when my manager was looking for any excuse. He needed staff who were prepared to work every hour under the sun, often at the drop of a hat, and I wasn’t that person. I needed to write, and so whatever free time I had I spent at my desk, drifting in and out of sleep, trying to write short stories and novels that would never see the light of day.
The one thing I had going for me was that my rent back then was 250 quid a month. I could just about afford to live and pay bills while working between 20 and 30 hours a week. But it’s difficult to maintain a creative output when you’re not sure how long the situation is going to last. I always had the feeling that the carpet could be pulled out from under me at any moment. It makes the situation for most people who want to write novels for a living completely untenable, particularly if those people don’t have the income or financial backing that allows them to focus on the work they want to do. And if those same people have children or care responsibilities, the chances of finding the time to write slims to practically nothing.
It’s even harder now than it was then. Rent prices have doubled. The cost of living has skyrocketed. A whole generation of writers have been sidelined simply because they can’t afford to write. That means that most contemporary novels being published are written by people who come from a particular social background. And I’m not trying to take a swipe at anyone – posh people can write good books too. But I worry that contemporary literature is starting to look a lot like it did when novels were a leisurely pursuit, written by the bourgeoisie for the bourgeoisie, with little in the way of space for voices that should be, in this political climate, front and centre. Stagnant wages paired with a Tory government that has butchered funding to the arts has compounded the situation, and the people who are disproportionately affected by government policy and landlordism are being slowly flushed out in every artistic field.
Getting accepted on to a funded creative writing PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast, was a game changer for me. Although the monthly stipend wasn’t much to write home about, it was enough to cover rent and bills for the best part of three years. I finally had the space to read and write and think. That’s when I wrote my debut novel. I can say with confidence that Close to Home wouldn’t be the book it is if it hadn’t been for the PhD. Having it published has changed everything. For the first time in my life, I have money. I can write full-time, at least for the next few years, and knowing this brings a deep sense of calm and stability that I’ve never experienced before, at least not as an adult.
Although I’m not by any means free from the whims of landlords. During the time I spent writing this article, my girlfriend and I were sent an eviction notice. The landlord wants to do some work to the property and then advertise the house for four tenants at an increased rent. We have until June to find a new place to live.
