Brett Chapman, a 30-year-old film-maker based in Sheffield, has lived in seven different houses in the past 10 years. “I used to find renting really, really stressful – especially after leaving university,” he says. “You never feel comfortable when you move house every one or two years. You can’t decorate a place to make it a nice place to live.”
He is far from alone. Most millennials would need more than two hands to count the number of homes they have lived in since university – one friend of mine has lived in 25 places since she graduated. It is only natural that this perpetual state of instability will have an effect on their wellbeing. “I struggled with depression when I was younger and my living situation was a part of that,” Chapman says.
Many young people, like Chapman, have resigned themselves to never owning a house. “It’s one of the things a lot of people are raised to believe is a ‘must’ in life, so to have that seem so impossible made me feel I’d failed in some way,” he says. A recent report from the Resolution Foundation predicted that one in three millennials will never own their own home, and half will be renting in their 40s. A third of those could still be doing so by the time they claim their pensions.
A radical solution was proposed earlier this week: bridge the intergenerational gap between millennials and baby boomers by giving every 25-year-old £10,000. This “citizen’s inheritance” proposed by the Resolution Foundation would be funded by changes to inheritance tax and could help young people get on the property ladder. But, as some have pointed out, the average deposit in London is £80,000 and elsewhere it is £20,000. This, coupled with mounting student debts and an increase in insecure jobs, means that while it is a welcome suggestion, it doesn’t solve the problem of unaffordable deposits.
Renting, of course, wouldn’t be so bad if tenants’ rights were better protected. As it stands, any landlord can evict a tenant with just two months’ notice after a fixed-term period under a section 21 agreement without providing any reason at all. Tenants are left to find the money to move, pay another lot of letting agents’ fees and get a deposit together.
Last week, the mental health charity Mind launched a major housing campaign, with figures showing that nearly 79% of people with mental health problems say a housing situation has caused a mental health problem or made their mental health worse.
“Housing and mental health are often linked,” says Paul Spencer, a policy manager at Mind. “The lack of security in rented accommodation can be damaging for mental health and involuntary home moves can have a particularly severe effect … For those of us with mental health problems, it may also mean you have to move away from mental health services or other services in your community that were supporting you.”
Even if the strain on your mental health brought on by unstable renting hasn’t reached clinical levels, the effects of not having a permanent place to call home can still be profound. Katie Beswick, 34, is a university lecturer and lives in Devon. She left London, where she is grew up, because she couldn’t afford to live in the capital. She misses the community she had there, and found some of the anxiety issues she had previously had returned when she moved.
“I can’t see my family when I want to, I can’t meet up with my friends. All of my contacts, my close friends, are in the south-east. It really upsets me,” she says. “I had a very dark period of time when I first moved and nobody I even remotely knew lived nearby … Simple stuff, like popping over to my mum’s for a cup of tea and a chat, is very calming, but here that isn’t possible.” Beswick’s tenancy feels stable-ish at the moment, and she has finally bought some of her own furniture (it was cheaper to rent an unfurnished place). But were she to face a notice to leave, she says she wouldn’t be able to afford it.
“Poor mental health can occur when you move away from your family or other support networks,” says Paul Spencer. “Frequent moves can disrupt relationships with social support networks and make it harder to establish new ones, all the while increasing your sense of personal insecurity.”
Tia Spencer, 21, is a bar worker from Manchester. She has just found out that her landlord is selling the shared house in which she has lived for the past three months, and she has to get out within weeks. Prior to this, Tia, who grew up in care, was homeless, and spent months sofa-surfing after being made unemployed. “I thought things would be good for a bit,” she says. “It’s disgusting. The landlord didn’t even tell us. We found a letter in the kitchen.”
She has had depression and anxiety issues for a number of years, which became worse when she was forced to move. It is “draining”, Tia says. “You don’t even want to unpack. I can’t reach my long-term goals if I’m constantly worried about where I’m going to be living. It puts my life on hold.”
Both Tia and Chapman say they would happily rent for life if renting were more stable, something the Resolution Foundation has recommended in the form of “indeterminate” tenancies, which have been introduced in Scotland. However, they don’t exist in England.
“If I don’t buy a house I’m OK with it,” says Tia. “But I want kids and I’d want them to have stability. I hate moving around – I wouldn’t want them to go through it.”
The number of privately rented households with children has tripled from 600,000 in 2003 to 1.8m in 2016. “We know that the private rented sector is the least secure and the lowest-quality tenure of all types, and that is obviously not a great place to bring up your kids,” says Lindsay Judge, a senior policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation. “The vast majority of private rented contracts are assured shorthold tenancies, so in theory you could have to get out with two months’ notice. That’s grim for anybody if you don’t want to leave, but if you have got children in school, your social networks, your support systems, these things are more challenging if you have got a family and you are trying to create a stable home.”
Having to rent will naturally affect people’s family planning – and the profound disappointment of not being able to reach life goals such as having children is unlikely to have a positive effect on existing mental health conditions. “I’m not someone who has desperately craved children, but I do feel the choice has been taken away from me,” says Beswick. “I’m really angry at the government for allowing the housing market to spiral out of control to the point where a whole generation of us is stuck in a kind of extended adolescence.”
There are, of course, some upsides to renting. “Having someone on hand if something goes wrong with the oven or boiler is fantastic,” says Laura Davies, a 27-year-old marketing manager living in Bournemouth with her partner, an assistant retail manager, and her seven-year-old son. That said, “Having a family in rented accommodation isn’t ideal,” she says. “With the real fear that you may one day have to up and leave the place your child calls home, it’s hard to feel you are truly settled … I have sleepless nights and anxiety-filled evenings stressing about what the future holds, housing-wise. I’m lucky that my child is really laid-back. But I’m always worried that my stress will affect him somehow.”
She would love to own a home, but with nearly half the couple’s income going on rent, “I doubt that we ever will.” If they had a mortgage, she would be paying less every month than in rent. “But without any savings for a deposit, it leaves us always out of reach of owning.”
Chapman says he is not able to save for a deposit, either. “At my age, you start thinking you need a bit more security, and the panic starts to set in,” he says. “When I’m older, I won’t have the energy to keep moving around all the time.”
The Resolution Foundation’s report predicted an explosion in the housing benefits bill once millennials reach retirement, with it more than doubling in the worst-case scenario. “The figures are hitting home now,” says Judge. “And I think what will hit home much more in the next 10-15 years is this issue of pensioners in the private rented sector, because the concerns we have about families with children also apply to pensioners. Most people think it’s not a good idea if you’re elderly to have to leave your home with two months’ notice, to have to leave your local community where your support system is.”
This will increase pressure on policymakers to make the private rented sector more fit for purpose over a lifetime. The Resolution Foundation’s recommendations of introducing indeterminate tenancies, stabilising rents to avoid the sudden spikes that currently affect tenants (balanced with rules that continue to allow landlords to charge market rents), as well as compulsory landlord registration, could go some way to making the sector more stable for renters. Mind’s campaign, too, is a positive step in highlighting the detrimental effect of poor housing on mental health.
Shared ownership and help to buy have been pushed as solutions to unstable living. But these new-build homes are still not affordable for many people. Figures last year revealed that the help-to-buy scheme had been taken advantage of by thousands of high earners.
The truth remains that, if you do find yourself able to buy a house, it might end up being hundreds of miles from the community you call home. In 2013, the mother of 26-year-old producer and writer Siana Bangura’s moved the family from Peckham in south-east London to Coventry in the West Midlands, as they were no longer able to afford the rocketing rents in the area. They rent a house privately and Bangura lives at home.
“It makes me feel really frustrated and alienated. To be pushed out of where you are from is a lot,” she says. “I’d never identify as having experienced depression in the clinical sense. However, moving away from where I’m from and all my friends live, coupled with navigating life after university, all contributed to a very deep sadness,” she says.
Her mum is a lot happier in Coventry, Bangura says. And although Bangura is freelance and not able to save at the moment, she is optimistic that she might be able to own somewhere in the West Midlands one day. “I was like, ‘I am going to give Coventry a chance because I have to.’ It’s been a humbling experience for me.”
Like Bangura, millions of us are having to revise our expectations. But a lack of housing affordability isn’t just a question of cash – it has the potential to affect our sense of stability, our wellbeing and mental health, and our family planning. A home is so much more than a roof over your head.
