If confirmation were needed that the shared house is no longer a home but a collection of sleeping spaces designed primarily to make your landlord even richer, stand by for depressing news about the death of the living room.
According to an analysis of house-sharing websites advertising rooms for rent, 90% advertised in London had no separate living room, with communal space turned into a bedroom. The research by the Times found one living room had been divided into two small bedrooms with a partition wall going across a radiator and a window. In another, the bed was centimetres from an old gas fire. Of properties that now had five bedrooms, 88% were not registered as houses in multiple occupation (HMO), which have minimum size standards, and some were illegally small.
“I mostly think it’s a very bad idea,” says Julia Park, a housing campaigner and head of research at the architectural firm Levitt Bernstein, of the living room’s demise. “The main reason it’s happening is greed.”
Some landlords put basic cooking and washing facilities in rooms that are barely a few square metres in size so that they can do away even with a kitchen, let alone a living room. “While we all need, and like, time alone, we are basically social creatures – we enjoy company and need spaces that are conducive to relaxing with other people,” says Park. “That’s much easier in a room that is dedicated for that shared purpose. So we should be very concerned that it’s become so normal for HMOs not to provide a room for flatmates to socialise outside of their bedrooms.” There are concerns about the long-term impact of these homes on the wellbeing of tenants.
“It’s generally bad for our mental health to spend too much time in one space, and the quality of the space matters too – it’s even more damaging to spend long periods in a room that is very small or dark, for example,” says Park. “It’s also important to have different spaces for different activities – it doesn’t take long to feel cooped up.”
We all have different tolerance levels and expectations. An antisocial house share can be a useful money-saver for a young person starting on the career ladder, but, while we might once have put up with living like this for a year or two while we worked towards a place of our own, prohibitive house prices mean sharing a house or flat is becoming a more permanent arrangement for Generation Rent. “I think that makes it all the more important to try to find people you’re comfortable living with and turn it into a positive shared experience rather than just co-existing,” says Park.
