I’m knackered. Having thought I’d found my dream rental home last year in the form of an overpriced, not properly accessible bungalow with an inaccessible bathroom, and having had conversations with the landlord about long-term letting because finding properties even of this relatively shoddy calibre and eye-watering rental price point is next to impossible, it now turns out he’s selling up.
As part of my frantic scouting round for a) an available property and b) one I can actually access as a Disabled person, I’ve also discovered that only 5% of properties are affordable with housing benefit. Given that 17% of people in the UK live in social housing, and many, many more need to use housing benefit to pay, at least in part, for social sector housing – how is this working out? My fingers are in a tangle from having tried to do the sums on them. It doesn’t add up.
Housing benefit has been frozen for several years – and even when it was going up, it was still out of whack with commercial rents. Rents have skyrocketed beyond both wages and benefits. Where exactly are people supposed to live? A dear friend of mine recently lost a close friend, a severely disabled friend, in the US, who had been forced to live in her vehicle. How has this state of affairs been allowed to happen? How is it allowed to become a global issue? Housing is the most basic of the Maslowian heirarchy of needs.
