You Won’t Believe How Many Times I’ve Moved in Just 3 Short Years!

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I was sitting writing at my desk when an email from my rental agency appeared. Opening it, I felt my stomach drop.

I had been facing an ordeal in our little London where the wiring to the kitchen had broken, rendering all the appliances unusable.

It took a month to fix the problem, despite a series of polite and carefully worded emails reminding our leasing agency that my boyfriend and I were living on sandwiches and dry cereal as a result.

Us we were in the middle of negotiating some sort of compensation, so I was hoping for some sort of remittance to make up for all the food we were forced to throw away and the long schleps to the laundromats carrying dirty garbage bags. clothes.

Instead it was a short email saying our rent would be increased by over £200 per month to be “in line with market trends”.

My eyes scanned the email twice before refreshing the page, feeling like I was hallucinating. I then calmly stood up, walked to the bedroom where my boyfriend was reading, and relayed the news to him.

There was a brief pause before we both immediately turned the air blue, a violent series of obscenities spilling from our lips.

The oath came from a place of bitter frustration and exhaustion. The rent increase: an extra £2400 a year out of our own pockets that we really can’t afford plus increased council taxes and energy bills – means we may have to pack up all our furniture once more to find a more affordable place to call home.

I know that I am far from alone in this tedious mission of keeping a roof over my head.

Rents have risen 20% throughout the capital with a third of rooms (not houses, rooms) costing more than £1000 a month. Unaffordable housing has caused young people to flee London in the hope of finding cheaper accommodation elsewhere.

The act of moving is expensive, as my boyfriend and I prepare our bank accounts for another substantial hit less than a year after the last one.

Last summer we were unceremoniously kicked out of our beautiful one-bedroom apartment with only two months’ notice, as the landlord’s son decided he wanted to live there.

We felt a growing level of resentment towards him, whom we exclusively referred to as ‘the jerk’s son’ when costs began to rise; renting a moving truck, paying cleaning fees, sorting out deposits on hold, and paying a month’s rent in advance for our new apartment—money we didn’t want to spend because we didn’t want to move.

In all, the move-in process last summer consumed around £3000 of our savings – we got around half of that from the deposit on our old flat. I felt my temples pound with rage when I saw the ridiculous deductions from our deposit.

“Binman didn’t collect the rubbish so we had to dispose of it ourselves,” said the letting agent, almost apologetic when asked why an email chain was missing £100.

‘Please can you point out where my problem is?’ He wanted to reply, but I didn’t because he was relieved to get something back. After all, I was once charged £30 for ‘dust residue’ from a property.

My friends have urged me to leave London, but any suggestion of venturing out of the city irritates me.

I appreciate that I’m extremely lucky to have a generous father who can weigh in if things get really tough, but there’s something profoundly depressing about having to beg my retired mother for some money to live on, as if keeping a roof over our heads. It was an elegant luxury as opposed to an essential necessity.

It’s the emotional impact of not knowing where you’re going to live that hits the hardest.

A survey by VeryWell Mind found that more than half of us consider moving to be one of life’s most stressful events. I can confirm, as someone who has rented for 10 years, being forced in and out of apartments at someone else’s whim has left me with acute and permanent stress.

My skin is itchy and inflamed from where I’ve been torn and pulled from the anxiety of knowing I have to act quickly to find a new place to live.

For the owners, these houses are simply an asset to generate a passive income, but for me and my boyfriend, these properties have been our homes.

Memories of our life together weigh on every room: the living room where he hugged me after a hard day, the kitchen where he announced his promotion, the time we spent all weekend in the bedroom shaking and sweating as we battled a nasty cold. , our hands in a wet grip as we sneezed and sobbed.

My friends have urged me to leave London, but any suggestion of venturing out of the city irritates me. Both of our careers are in London, and most of our friends and family live here; our whole life has been built and entangled in this city.

But my reluctance to leave London behind is because, although it is often difficult to be here, I love living here. It is the only place where I can say that I have been truly happy. I refuse to get up and leave, no matter how hard the landlords make it.

I called my mother a few days later to vent about the situation, complaining that we would never realize the dream of owning our own place in a city we had chosen as our home.

‘There’s a EuroMillions lottery you could enter,’ she said, in what I imagine was her trying to be helpful. The jackpot is £75 million.

I hung up the phone, massaged my temples exhaustedly, and went back to navigating RightMove once more.

I rummaged through the apartments outside of our budget, my mother’s words echoing in my brain.

If people can’t buy a home without resorting to sweepstakes and gambling on sheer luck, then it’s time to finally acknowledge that the rental system in this city is really broken, and no one is bothering to fix it.

Do you have a story you would like to share? Get in touch by email Kimberley.Bond@metro.co.uk

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FURTHER : “I paid nearly £2,000 a month to live in a damp, moldy flat, then got kicked out after complaining”

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