Trapped

[Elizabeth]

I’m 71, a retired community worker. All my working life I earned an average wage, living in a city where rents or mortgages have long been way out of reach for a single woman. So I’ve rented from housing associations for forty years; and now can see no way to get out.
Nearly every interaction with my landlord is frustrating, demeaning or worse. But I can see no way out.
My current rent for a small, uninsulated basement flat is £202pw. The full state pension’s £230pw. Most older don’t even get that much. Although we’re barely mentioned in the housing crisis context, the lack of autonomy choice is as devastating as our invisibility..
Now “social” landlords have succeeded in lobbies for above inflation rent hikes they’re pressing for rent convergence, ie hikes way above inflation, for tenants in expensive areas.
These areas weren’t rich when we moved into them fifty years ago. Where I live was even an infamous slum in my young years; but now it’s gentrified and my rent is much lower than the private ones next door. So apparently that means mine should soar too. The money a landlord could get, seems far more relevant to policy makers than my and my peers’ increasing poverty. Or our decades of contribution to the neighbourhood that is our home..
It’s the humiliation of renting in this sector that is worse.
After independent useful lives, we’re retired into being at the mercy of the whims, fashions and decisions of the hugely paid strangers who run our landlords.
It’s like a dystopian film about being dominated by humanoid robots, but without the fun ending.
If the person behind a computer-screen decides the noise we endure in flimsy flats isn’t bad enough for soundproofing, we live with the noise.
If they decide our homes should be pulled down and we must move into the tower block or concrete cube they built, that happens.
If they decide to house scary, angry people next door or upstairs, they do. We’re not seen or heard as people but as “our residents”, to be patronised, owned and controlled.
It’s horribly frightening to contemplate this enforced subservience as a life sentence.
Do old people on low incomes, figure in any housing plans that they’ve written themselves? If so, where?

[Karen Rowe]

After moving into my mother in laws house to look after her mother who was very poorly I had to give up the house I had from another housing association.
My health has since gotten worse and I have had a full knee replacement in dec 2024. My arthritis is in every joint that I have.
I am registered disabled and I have medical need to move. Nit this does not matter to my mother in laws landlord nor does it bother them that me and husband who is my carer sleep on sofas every night. I have been on the waiting list with Curo since 2009 and yet still nothing is available apparently

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