“I’m never going to do the Facebook post of me holding the house keys to my own house. I’m never going to have that feeling—I won’t know what it’s like.” Emma (not her real name) works with refugees and lives with her teenage son in a two-bedroom house. She rents her home privately from a Manchester housing association on a market rent scheme. She has been temporarily signed off from work because of stress, even though she loves her job.
The problem is her housing or, more specifically, the unaffordability of her housing. A letter from her landlord raising the rent in January turned her world upside down. After fleeing from domestic abuse, she was happy to have found a quiet, comfortable flat in Levenshulme in the south of Manchester. But when the rent increased to an amount she couldn’t afford, she began to doubt herself.
“The…
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