Housing associations must stop acting as if their tenants need to be saved

I think some providers have shifted into continually reminding tenants the properties we live in and pay for don’t belong to us. But where is the acknowledgement of the rent we pay, the lives we lead, our right to agency in our own lives?

A high percentage of tenants are middle-aged and older: we took tenancies as a mainstream option when we were young – and our homes were explicitly rented for life and referred to usually as community or public housing.

Nowadays many landlords’ employees approach tenants as the endlessly characterised “most vulnerable in society”, eagerly keen to help us aspire. That most of us don’t want or need to, seems to have been lost.

The selling off of many council homes without replacement and the rise in the dominance of corporate giant housing associations, has of course changed the landscape. Now hugely paid decision-makers are unlikely to be renting or have as their own neighbours the retail staff, nurses, care workers, community and voluntary sector employees, factory workers, manual tradespeople, nursery nurses and health professionals who are still “social” tenants.

Nowadays many landlords’ employees approach tenants as the endlessly characterised “most vulnerable in society”, eagerly keen to help us aspire. That most of us don’t want or need to, seems to have been lost. Being clientised in older age when we have no way of moving anywhere else is painful and demeaning. But what of younger tenants?

The shrunken pool of homes has made gatekeeping the norm. Somehow the long term lack of supply has led to the message our homes belong not to us but to our landlords’ staff. And even more bizarrely, so do our lives! Employees increasingly behave as if they manage “communities” rather than simply ensuring the buildings we rent are in good nick.

The real message of temporary tenures, is that people should be processed and managed. All-powerful strangers behind computers, grant probationary tenancy agreements to tenants who must first declare themselves as mad, bad or sad.

Later they decide how long people can live in their homes. Are they needy and vulnerable enough? Earning little enough? Obedient enough?

The question could be “how can we bring together neighbourhoods to advise and lobby for the homes that are required?” not “how can we move this latest bunch out of ‘our’ properties?”

The deficit model is a self-feeding monster. People living through temporary crises get labelled with a victim identity that must be retained to keep a home.

Providing good homes with rents linked to local incomes is an invaluable, essential thing. It doesn’t need to trigger claims of saviourhood or rescue, or demean those renting them.

Landlords begin to claim to turn round people’s lives, enable people to be independent, empower people. Yet people move forward after divorce, illness, bereavement, redundancy and times of acute poverty in every form of housing tenure.

Providing good homes with rents linked to local incomes is an invaluable, essential thing. It doesn’t need to trigger claims of saviourhood or rescue, or demean those renting them.

If we’re all clients, conversations die out and “engagement strategies” move in. People in all their diversity and difference are described en bloc as “our residents”. Tenant comes to mean lower person. The strengths and expertise of multi-generational, resilient working people are sidelined.

Last year I helped set up a community-led housing forum in London where I live. The eagerness for self-run options was exciting. People from private and social rented housing, young adults still living with parents, co-op members wanting to expand their offer, gathered in a series of well-attended meetings. At the end people were asked to summarise the sessions. The same refrains rang out each time.

“Where will our children live?”, “let’s try to reach our landlords and start a dialogue of equals”, “I love the idea of gaining control of my own life” and “we’re stronger together”.

When the Brexit palaver is over and presumably we have a new government, we – neighbourhoods, campaigners, politicians, housing providers – should meet and move forward into a cleaner, more respectful relationship.

Let’s ditch temporary tenancies and try, together, to create more homes.

Elizabeth Spring, third sector development manager