After 12 years of renting, I’ve known my fair share of landlords – although “known” is probably the wrong term. I don’t usually meet them in person and rarely speak to them directly, only communicating through a managing estate agent or, if I’m lucky, email. They often exist in my mind as frightening spectres of exploitation: mere initials on a contract, but with the unsettling power to displace me at short notice.
But that all changed one freezing night in March 2023, at a friend’s house party in Dalston, east London. On arrival, I stuffed cans of White Claw in to the small fridge and scanned the room. I ended up chatting to a man I had never met before, who introduced himself as a friend of the host’s new boyfriend. He was a little older than me, with a mop of unremarkable brown hair and a slightly awkward demeanour.
We made the usual small talk about where we were from and whom we knew at the party. He was based in France, but used to live in the UK and still had a house here. Whereabouts, I asked? His house was in south-east London – near to where I had previously lived, as it turned out. I laughed when he mentioned the road I used to live on and asked which number. As he mouthed the exact number of my former home, a horrifying thought dawned on me: I was speaking to my former landlord.
I was so overwhelmed by the serendipity that I immediately identified myself. “It’s me!” I exclaimed, as if reuniting with an old friend. “Ruby. Your former tenant!” I was met with a bemused response and a vague recollection of my name. Then he asked: “I was a pretty good landlord, no?”
I felt a familiar feeling of hierarchy start to affect our conversation. I wanted to say: “You were as good as someone who takes passive income from me and my friends while we have no security or assurance can be.”
What I actually said was: “Yeah!”
Why had I responded like that? I have spent a long time advocating for renters’ rights, yet, in the face of a real-life landlord, I became quite pathetic. My housemates and I had moved out of the property after the pandemic, wanting a change of scenery after months of lockdown. Despite leaving with no bad blood, the conversation caused me to feel anxious. My brain hypothesised solutions to my eternal problem: housing insecurity. Maybe he would let me live there again. For a cheaper rent.
In theory, the landlord-tenant relationship should be reciprocal – they need your rent, you need their house. But, in reality, it often feels far more imbalanced: property values and rents continue to soar, while private tenants face the worst housing conditions of any type of tenure, paying on average 36% of their income on rent. While no-fault evictions – one of the leading causes of homelessness – will be abolished in England next month (they were effectively outlawed in Scotland in 2017), there are still many avenues by which a landlord can easily remove a tenant, some of which I have experienced.
Under the new Renters’ Rights Act, a tenant can challenge an “unfair” rent increase, but unfair is defined only as above the market rate. Landlords can also evict tenants if the landlord intends to move a family member into the property, but it is unclear how this will be regulated. I have been evicted twice under a section 21 (no-fault eviction) notice – once when my landlord needed to sell and once when my landlord wanted to raise the rent by £850 a month – and I still live with the lingering fear that I may have to move out of my home prematurely. All the while, home ownership remains unattainable for me and many others, with the average first-time-buyer property costing about 5.9 times the average income.
At the time, I immediately regretted my cowardly response to my former landlord’s question, but in the days that followed I came to view the interaction differently. In my mind, landlords had become unchallengeable villains: often unseen, but with the ability to destroy my life on a whim. But that night I realised that they are also human. Normal, slightly awkward, party-going human beings.
Meeting my old landlord in person gave me the confidence to stand up for myself in an objectively unfair game, to make challenges when necessary and to know my rights. I’ve successfully held my ground when subsequent landlords have tried to raise my rent, while helping other renters negotiate against rent increases and fight unfair eviction notices. I tell friends what I wish I’d told myself: ask for what you need. Push back against the unreasonable. Educate yourself and be prepared: they walk among us.
