With getting on the property ladder increasingly out of reach for young people, some enterprising Hackney residents are finding creative places to live.
It’s no secret that London is in the grips of a housing crisis, and Hackney has been particularly hard hit.
Rents have increased by more than a third since 2011, according to the council, and over 13,000 families are on the waiting list for a council home.
For young people especially, the prospect of getting on the property ladder is an increasingly distant one. The average property price in Hackney in 2016 was £567,230, a staggering jump from £46,847 in 1996.
With the renting market no less hostile, many Hackney residents are turning to more creative and, crucially, cheaper ways to live in a city in which is becoming increasingly difficult for younger people to find a foothold.
One such endeavour is property guardianship. Dubbed ‘legal squatters’, property guardians move into vacant properties and keep them in good condition on behalf of their owners, warding off squatters in the process.
As rents soar, it’s becoming an increasingly popular way for young people to find a place to live in the borough.
Mina Abdurahman, 26, has been living in a repurposed pub in Haggerston for the past two months. She works in Shoreditch and wanted to live closer to work without paying through the nose so, on the advice of a co-worker, decided to become a property guardian.
“It’s a much cheaper way of living,” she explained. “Usually in this part of London you will look at paying up to £800 per month in rent – whereas I only pay £500.
“If I hadn’t become a property guardian I’d have had to move somewhere miles away like Barnet.”
Mina lives with four other people above the pub, and another lives in what used to be the bar. “They’re all in their twenties too,” she explains. “And they’re all doing it for financial reasons as well.”
The benefit of becoming a property guardian isn’t just economic, though. David Stoker, who has been a guardian just over the borough boundary in Bow for 14 months, was drawn to it for social and societal reasons as much as anything else.
Stoker found his flat – a converted care home which he affectionately calls “a granny flat” – through Dot Dot Dot, a social enterprise that fixes up guardians in disused properties and asks them to do 16 hours of volunteering in return.
“I do 16 hours of volunteering each month,” Stoker told the Post. “Last night we did a fun run from a local gym to a local community centre where we helped repaint some of the walls. We’re also helping to build a community garden in Victoria Park.”
At the end of the day though, it all boils down to money.
“My rent is half the market rent here,” Stoker – who was a guardian in Tottenham for 18 months before moving to Bow – said. “£500 per month for a studio flat in zone 2 is pretty good, and it’s allowed me to save up for a deposit.”
Some young people are shunning bricks and mortar altogether and setting course for the canals.
In 2010 there were just 413 ‘continuous cruisers’ (CC-ers, in boating speak) in London. CC-ers pay an annual fee of about £800, which covers insurance and a boat licence, and allows the boat-owner to moor up wherever they please, provided they set sail for somewhere new every fortnight.
By 2016, the number of CC-ers had spiked to 1,615, and the Canal and River Trust said that a new CC-er was arriving in London every day.
Hackney is a particular hotspot. Between 2013 and 2015 there was an 85% increase in the number of houseboats monitored in Hackney, on Regent’s Canal and the River Lea, which remain desirable destinations for boaters.
In recent years, however, life on the water seems to be losing its lustre.
Mateus, 35, moved to a boat on the River Lea a few months ago but, he told the Post, now wants to leave. “It’s not the life I thought it would be,” he said.
A recent spike in riverway crime might have played some part in Mateus’ disillusionment. Last November, the Post reported that a spate of boat break-ins on the River Lea had raised residents’ ire, causing Springfield Police to increase patrols.
Across October and November 2018, London’s canals witnessed 54 crimes, the majority of them boat break-ins, compared to just 11 in August and September, according to data collected by one local boater.
Indeed, despite Hackneyites best efforts to work their way around the housing crisis, it seems that this is a problem without any obvious solution.
As the Post reveals this week, a series of luxury developments across the borough is doing little to assuage residents’ concerns that Hackney is becoming a less and less accessible place to live as gentrification continues apace.
And, for a lot of young people, the answer is not a property guardianship or a houseboat, but a move back home. 19 per cent of 21-35 year old Londoners either live with their parents or have never moved out in the first place.
Ironically, Brexit – which is overwhelmingly loathed by young Londoners – could prove something of a saving grace. House prices may slump when Britain eventually leaves the EU, with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors reporting that a majority of estate agents and surveyors expect prices to decline over the next few months.
Even if that does happen, however, Hackney’s housing situation offers little encouragement for young people. It would be no surprise to see people get increasingly creative as they try to crack the crisis.
With additional reporting by Charlie Wood.
