20 March 1987: How to find a £9 a week flat in central London: Short-life rent can be happy when it means a roof over your head, says Jane Ferguson
In the past five years I have moved home 10 times. No chance for me as a pen pal: I have pages devoted to me in friends’ address books. Psychologists claim moving house ranks third only to bereavement and divorce in its unsettling effects; after all, it is where the heart is. I’m not crazy, it is just that I have chosen to live in short-life housing.
It did not need this year’s International Year of the Homeless to highlight the problems of housing. Rents in central London are hysterically high – more than £100 a week for one room is not unusual – and there were takers for a converted broom cupboard (literally) in Knightsbridge at £36,500.
Short-life housing, as the name suggests, is not permanent but rented on a short lease. Back in 1981,
straight out of university, I arrived in London and together with six like-minded friends formed Uptown Housing Co-Operative. First, we registered as a company under the Friendly Societies Act using guidelines laid down by the empty property unit at Shelter. It cost us £20 a piece but today it has increased to £275.
Then began the search for suitable properties. Uptown lease flats and houses from a local housing association. This is briefly how it works: when the association buys properties for conversion into accommodation suitable for its own tenants, there is a period of time during which it has to apply for government funds to refurbish them and to invite competing tenders from contractors to do the work. In order that the properties are not left empty it licences them to short-life groups.
This is a sensible allocation of resources as upkeep is maintained, a small amount of revenue is accrued and the groups are given rooms for their members. (Even so, there are about 660,000 empty properties in Britain although not all of them are available for use.) The disadvantage of short-life is obvious but in this case justice does reap some advantages.
Rents are cheap. In the beginning, we all paid £5 a week. Now, increased costs mean a weekly rent of around £9 – still a bargain for central London. There is great freedom in not having mortgages or high rents to pay. We administer the co-op ourselves – collect the rents, keep the accounts – so there is no possibility of a nasty landlord intimidating us. Budding Rachmans don’t get a foot in the door.
Many of the original members have now left – gone abroad, married, bought their own places – but there has been no shortage of people to take their place and now Uptown houses around 40 young people. We are a varied group ranging from motorcycle messengers to the unemployed, artists and actors, teachers, designers, journalists and computer operators.
How short is short-life? It could be six months, it may be six years. Some properties need painting, others have wall-to-wall carpeting and central heating. You just take your chance and when it is time to move, everyone rallies round. Ten people can make light work of a move.
Six years on, I am expert at driving trucks, carrying sofas, connecting gas cookers, putting up shelves and packing cardboard boxes. The life of a 1980s hobo can be a mite unsettling, but it is cheap, and it’s a good way to develop diplomacy and biceps.