A childminder is fearing homelessness and unemployment as her landlord evicts her to turn the property into an HMO.
Sarah, 50, has never missed a rent payment in the 14 years she's lived in her four-bed house on Ashdale Road off Rice Lane in Walton. She raised two sons and runs a childminding business here. She laid the floors and plastered the hallway herself.
Just last year, she spent £2k on new window blinds for the living room. She wouldn't have bothered if she knew what was to come. A few weeks ago she got a call from her landlord saying he'd sold the property to his son, who is turning it into a house in multiple occupation (HMO). A Section 21 eviction notice would soon arrived through her letter box.
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They can make more money renting each room for £450 instead of the whole house for £600, even if two rooms are empty. Sarah, who we've given a pseudonym to protect her identity, had two months to leave, to find a new home for herself, one big enough and close enough to her clients and to parks to keep her job.
With rents up more than a third since 2019, this will mean a home more expensive than Sarah has known before. If she doesn't find somewhere, the parents who rely on her - to feed and entertain their kids or drop them to school so they can work - would be left scrambling to find a childminder or daycare in an industry plagued by staff shortages, closures, high costs and long waiting lists.
Annoyed and hurt, Sarah said: "I put the phone down because I had a cob on. I felt sick, I was crying. I actually walked out and around the park to my sister's. I couldn't stop crying."
Just three days before, she'd been at a public meeting, organised by Warbreck councillor Sam East, about the spread of HMOs in the area around Rice Lane - and landlords' use of 'no fault' Section 21 evictions to make room for them.
For the last 12 months, Sarah has lived next to a "constant bang, bang, bang", Monday to Sunday, as the neighbouring house is converted into a HMO. Residents have noticed their numbers explode in the last eight years, and they fear it's changing the character of the community around Rice Lane.
It's a standard residential area with Victorian terraced houses, bigger on the west side of Rice Lane. An 'everyone knows everyone' area, they've traditionally been family homes, with parents and kids, siblings, cousins, aunties and uncles living in close proximity to one another.
Cllr East told the ECHO: "I represent a community that is and has always been proud of being a community, and I think we're starting to feel the impact of people who are perpetually moving through the community."
This area is on the cheap side compared with house prices nationally, which are double the cost of a home here. That low price tag attracts investors who see houses as an opportunity to turn a profit. TikTok is full of landlords showing renovations of terraced houses while boasting profits of around £1,000 per house each month.
Cllr East described it as "a great racket for developers". He said: "Landlords benefit in so many ways from HMOs. Obviously they get more money, especially when the property is full. But they also tend to get tenants who are much less likely to make those repair requests, less likely to request maintenance, less likely to know their rights as tenants, so it's a lot less hassle for them as well."
With those profits comes an increase in the number of households, and additional pressures on parking, bins and the local community in an already densely populated area. Cllr East said: "Speculative landlords will buy cheap housing, they'll chop it up, and they will never see the impact it has on the community.
"They never see the impact of where previously there was one car for the household, and then there are suddenly five families or five individuals, each with their own car. It doesn't sound like it's the end of the world, but it's a real nuisance to place on people's lives."
There's no planning process for HMOs with six occupants or less, meaning they can spread without local residents and councillors being aware or having the opportunity to object. They're a logical place to live for many people like students or those who move a lot for work, Cllr East admits.
Properly managed and spread evenly, they can be part of a solution to housing shortages. But they tend to be centred in areas like this where residents feel their community is disappearing. "You don't see the same faces for very long", according to Faye, who grew up here, "it's a terrible shame because it would be nice to get to know people".
Sarah agrees "it's changing dramatically, it's going down terrible", saying: "It was just all families, and then all of a sudden, you don't know your neighbours."
Residents who spoke to the ECHO also complained of antisocial behaviour and loud parties associated with some HMOs, and of their concerns for safety living beside neighbours they don't know.
Liverpool Council can push landlords to ensure living conditions and tackle antisocial behaviour in their properties thanks to a landlord licensing scheme. This was reintroduced in 16 wards in April 2022 after being suspended in 2019. However, this does not limit the number of HMOs.
Long-term residents, their kids and grandkids would love to buy houses around Rice Lane when they come up for sale. With family and friends on their doorstep, and parks, supermarkets and train stations less than a 10-minute walk away, it's somewhere people want to stay.
Faye lives in a former HMO on Yew Tree Lane. Her dad bought it in 1975, keeping it as a family home until selling it to his daughter 20 years ago. It was in "a terrible state" when he first laid hands on it, according to Faye, who said: "It took a lot to do it up. All the doors were ruined because they all had individual locks on. A lot of the interior beading was ruined.
"I don't think there was even a full bathroom in there in the beginning. My dad literally shovelled mattresses off the floor. He would be working in the daytime and spending all hours there. They had to plough thousands in. The amount of time it took to get it habitable was incredible."
A renovation takes time and money most people don't have. Faye said: "Local families have tried to buy the houses, but because they've come from elderly residents who have not necessarily kept up with repairs - because it's expensive, they're big houses - there's too much work to be done for a young family.
"I know of people who would have bought houses on this street because they need four-bedroom-plus houses, and they were unable to once you've added the price, the massive amounts of work that needs to be done - which doesn't always get done by these new landlords."
As the earning potential of rising rents draws family homes off the market and landlords towards HMOs, tenants feel insecure in their position. Sarah knows renters scared they'll be evicted if they ask their landlord for repairs or challenge a rent rise.
This is because landlords don't have to give a reason for a Section 21 eviction, according to a House of Commons research briefing. Cllr East said: "If people are genuinely scared all the time of being evicted from the place where they live, is that place their home?
"Can you realistically, ambitiously put down roots in a place when you know how easy it is for your landlord to just rip the carpet from under you and say, 'You've got two months'."
The government committed to banning these 'no fault' evictions in April 2019. But nearly 53,000 households have been issued with Section 21 notices since then, Inside Housing reported. Almost 20,000 were in the first 12 months after the government lifted a lockdown-era eviction ban in June 2021.
Cllr East fears a rush of landlords looking to eject tenants before 'no fault' evictions are abolished in legislation the government committed to bringing to parliament this year. Cllr East said: "Landlords aren't stupid, they see that coming down the line, and I suspect they're going to rush to push through 'no fault' evictions so they can make more money from these HMO conversions."
There's little Sarah can do to stop her eviction unless the landlord made mistakes in the paperwork. She can get free advice from Vauxhall Law Centre and support from Acorn, a tenants union that protests outside the homes of people threatened with eviction.
She can also stay while the landlord takes her to court to force her out, but this comes with the risk of paying the landlord's court costs.
In an attempt to halt the spread of HMOs in the Rice Lane area, Cllr East is campaigning for an Article 4 Direction requiring planning permission for new HMOs. To get one, Liverpool Council has to convince the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities that HMOs have a significant enough impact on a specific area to warrant it.
Such directions are already in place in other parts of the city like Wavertree, Picton and Kensington where there are large student populations. But some residents in these areas feel their streets have already passed a tipping point, and it can take years for an Article 4 Direction to be implemented.
In the meantime, people like Sarah face losing their home. She said: "Everyone is looking for me, everyone in the world and their oyster, but I don't know where I'm going."
Faye fears people are being priced out and their living standards degraded. She said: "They're just getting priced out by people who want to utilise the properties just for selfish gain. It's not fair on the people who are coming to live in those properties either. They're getting often substandard accommodation.
"50 years ago, my parents bought a house, which was essentially a house of multiple occupation, where people were not given quality housing. My dad had to deal with turning that back into a family home. Now we've come full circle and we're seeing exactly the same behaviours again.
"Why are we going back to that sort of mentality where it's okay for somebody to just have eight foot by six foot and share a toilet, share a bathroom, share a kitchen? Why are we returning to that? We're better than that, surely. We need a community, family area. That's what I grew up with and that's what I want for my daughter."
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