Vice's column London Rental Opportunity Of The Week showcases hilariously awful properties for rent in London and around the country. As my magazine is all about the struggles of renting in the city and how us students face this awful current property market, the concept for this column seems perfect to add a more lighthearted/comedic tone to my magazine.
After reading these articles, it reminded me of posts I see regularly on my Facebook on a group called Shit London. Used by Londoners to share their daily encounters, mostly funny and anecdotal, with a typically British dark side. It’s become a regular occurrence for members of the group to post random arrangements of objects found on the streets of London, accompanied with captions giving them rental prices per calendar month.
Posts by users of the page taking the piss out of extortionate London rental prices.
For my editorial article, I have decided to take an excerpt from London Rental Opportunity of the Week titled Rogue Landlord News Explainer Special! - a news story about rubbish landlords.
"What is it? It's a topical news story crammed into the ungainly structure of the London Rental Opportunity of the Week format; Where is it? Everywhere in Britain; What is there to do locally? Yeah, see, every time we do this – rev against the immoveable limits of the format until the wheels squeal – this is the bit where it goes wrong, because "What is there to do locally?" is not a question that pertains in any logical way to the news story "Absolutely zero rogue landlords have been added to a rogue landlord database since it was launched". I mean, I suppose the answer to that question is: "Not add any rogue landlords to a database," isn't it. I retract my previous frustration from the top of this paragraph. Alright, how much are they asking? I really don’t know why I do this every time. I do not have to do it like this;
The news story is this: an ITV/Guardian crossover event-of-the-summer investigation into rogue landlords has found that a sum total of zero rogue landlords have been added to a rogue landlord database since it was launched six months ago (this is: bad).
The investigation also found that landlords who had previously failed the "fit and proper" person tests – i.e. were ruled by a borough to be unfit to rent out a property to another human, and I mean how low can the barrier possibly be – were circumnavigating blurrily-written laws to rent properties out anyway, either through third-party property agents or in boroughs where they had yet to be found unfit and un-proper (this is: bad in a way that shines a light up to the housing law and reveals it to be translucent and useless and weighted once again on the side of landlords over tenants) (additional bracketed aside: it means your landlord could have already failed a "fit and proper" test and nobody will tell you, and they will still continue to rent your flat to you and not fix your boiler).
In one particular instance, ITV x Guardian investigators approached rogue landlord called Bernard McGowan – who reportedly boasts a £30 million property portfolio and rents out homes in the north London borough of Brent, despite failing the "fit and proper" landlord test there already – who then hid in a café toilet for half an hour before calling a cab to pick him up and then accidentally getting in the wrong car, on camera, while a reporter repeatedly calls him "Mr McGowan" (this is: very funny).
The wider situation, though, annoyingly, is not. As the Guardian reported yesterday, an estimated 5 million households are renting in the UK, with 250,000 families bringing up babies and infants in properties that fail to meet existing standards. LROTW tends to focus on overpriced studio flats in London, which skews the eventual renters to be affluent young people, but renting affects more than just our generation: middle-aged renters are on the up, and an estimated one in eight retirees will be renting by 2032 (presuming anyone can still retire by then) (presuming the planet is still alive).
It's easy to think of renting as an unendurable thing young people do at the behest of Disney villain landlords until they all couple up and get boring in their early thirties and somehow magic up a mortgage out of somewhere, but asGuardian reports show, rogue landlords such as Caffé Nero Toilet Prisoner Bernard McGowan normally target those on low income or benefit-covered rent, using their lack of a financial bargaining chip to cram them into overcrowded tenements or cut off electricity to force evictions, making them homeless on a whim. That affects renters across the age and income spectrums. Fundamentally, being a landlord is an immoral act, but the report shows that, essentially, you have to be actively vicious to fail the "fit and proper" test – and many of these big boy rogue landlords already have.
Moral: no moral, really. The law still sides with landlords, the rogue landlord database is entirely pointless, the "fit and proper" test isn’t fit for purpose, we have the wrong government to instigate any change about it, and once again I have to find myself saying – planting the idea like a seed hoping that, one day, after many dark months deep in the soil, from it an ugly plant will bloom – the only real way to incite change is to take to the streets with weapons and pull out all of Britain’s landlords by the hair and slaughter them like pigs, before piling their limbs along the Mall and burning the rest of the remains in a pyre.
I’m not saying "do it now". I’m saying: think about how satisfying it is going to be to boot the crooked teeth of a landlord out. Imagine them choking on thick ropes of their own blood. I'm not saying "do it now". I'm saying: visualise it. And then one day, wait for my signal, and we shall assemble."
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/a3pmqe/london-rental-opportunity-of-the-week-rogue-landlord-news-explainer-special
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