‘Rat Infestations, Mould and Poor Plumbing? Sounds Like a You Problem’: How Landlords Exploit the Inexperienced Position of Student Renters
By Meg Stalham
Nowadays, most young people opt for renting when looking to leave home as it is the most affordable and attainable option. It can be exciting moving out for the first time and living with housemates, who then become your family (or enemies, depending on your situation). But as young people are thrown into this new world of renting with little to no help, too many landlords exploit our lack of experience.
As well as dealing with overwhelming admin and bill-bundling companies omitting critical information, student renters face problematic landlords and crumbling, overpriced houses – something that is already a massive problem in the renting industry as it is. It is not a stretch to say that many landlords exploit the lack of
experience and know-how that student renters have. As a result, they get away with behaviour that we shouldn’t let slide.
This is in part fuelled by the stereotype that students (and young people in general) are lazy, drunk, dependent people with no idea how to take care of ourselves. Aligned with this stereotype is also the truth that students are under immense pressure, balancing university work, jobs, and maintaining a sleep schedule and social life, on top of tenant duties.
The reality is that many students would not fight the faceless authority of the landlord; we are too preoccupied with everything else, or we’re afraid of the power they wield over us, from withholding our deposits post-tenancy to eviction, which, although rarer in student property, is still a power that landlords have in their back pockets. It is also important to highlight that these issues disproportionately affect working-class students, who are even more vulnerable if their deposit is lost.
When you’re in your early twenties and inexperienced in this new world of renting, your instinct is to listen to the people wearing suits in the estate agents’ office. They seem to know best; they are Adults*. (*No matter your age, there are always going to be those who seem more experienced and ‘grown-up’ than you, who we instinctively look to for guidance. But it’s good to challenge the notion that Adults are always right. We should open the field to people of all ages offering different insights in order to reach solutions and come up with ideas.)
We students must remind ourselves that even though they may guide us through necessary steps in renting, they don’t necessarily want what’s best for us or to help us. At the end of the day, profits are the main priority here. Renting is a profiteering system in which our rent money goes into a black hole instead of into a mortgage payment, reducing the chances of young people becoming homeowners and expanding the wealth gap even more.
Every year, students move into overpriced houses with anything from mould and rat infestations to entire kitchens stinking of sewage as a result of busted plumbing. It’s a given that in your average student house – or any rented house – there will be the odd broken freezer or leaking tap, but many landlords manage to get away with straight-up neglect. Disregarding requests for help dealing with rat infestations or a leaking fridge, resorting to the response of ‘this is an issue that can be amended by tenants’, which roughly translates to ‘this sounds like a you problem’ and ‘I don’t want to spend money on this issue even though I own multiple houses and you’re already paying a ridiculous amount of rent to me’. As we have never had any lessons in such areas of life, many students and young renters put up with these problems and try to fix them alone, even when the landlord should take responsibility, or at least accountability.
Student houses are also more likely to get away with a lack of living space; most of them are former three-bedroom houses shoddily converted into six-bed places. I remember viewing a four-bedroom underground flat recently. It looked great in the photos, although it was at the very top of my budget. When we walked through the door, we were met with the smell of damp and mould, and it was glaringly obvious that this flat was built with the intention of being a one- or two-bedroom place. There was a tiny kitchen, following through to a space divided into a few bedrooms, one of which was divided in half with a mattress on its side, where the current tenants had clearly tried to make a living space (there wasn’t any form of communal area in the house). It was nothing like the pictures, and the students living there had clearly tried to make the best out of what little they had.
At another house viewing, the agent showing us around expressed how ‘lovely’ the landlord was because ‘he let his tenants have a wardrobe and a desk’ – the bar really is on the floor. Eventually, I found a decent house for rent. I know I am lucky: we signed contracts quickly and our house didn’t fall through (that’s another can of worms in the ruthless renting game). However, with unacceptable conditions being constantly normalised in the student housing market, it remains impossible for students to fight their landlords and we stay complicit with leaky ceilings and busted plumbing.
It’s true that many people live in even worse conditions than the average student renter and that all over the world, tenants have to put up with the most diabolical conditions due to neglect from both landlords and the government. This is a different story, but unfairness in the renting industry is all part of the same exploitative, profiteering capitalist spiderweb that puts money over humanity.
It’s time that we, as students, raised the criminally low bar on housing by holding exploitative landlords accountable and acknowledging the fact that they don’t rent out their houses out of the kindness of their hearts. We should not settle for poor excuses from landlords and companies omitting information, but of course, this is not always easy for everyone in a world where even fighting the landlord is a privilege.
With the bar so low and young people fighting for any house they can get (accelerated by the wealthy buying up houses and then renting them out at extortionate prices), landlords can continue to get away with mistreating their young tenants, tenants who struggle to see a future with themselves as homeowners, even though the person they are paying rent to owns several.