‘Our rental system is rigged’: young novelists on their generation’s housing crisis

theguardian.com:

Rents a one-bed flat with her boyfriend in Glasgow Daisy Lafarge, 31, was born in Hastings and studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow . Her debut novel Paul (20 21 ) won a Betty Trask award , and her poetry collection Life Without Air was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize

I remember the exact moment I first understood the concept of rent. I was six years old and in the local Safeway with my mum. It was a weekday evening – unusual, since we always did the weekly shop on a Saturday – but the childminder she’d just picked me up from had a policy of only providing snacks, not dinner, and I must have been hungry. I can’t remember how the topic of rent came up. Maybe I asked for something off the shelf and my mum said something like, how will we pay the rent if we buy things like that? Or maybe I’d got wind of a difference between us and people who owned their own homes, or maybe she’d alluded to something about us not being able to stay in the flat we were living in, which alarmed me. I was sensitive to instability: due to her teenage pregnancy and some chaotic family dynamics, I had experienced a lot of disruption by the age of six, already on my second school and close to moving on to a third.

To my mind, renting was the same as borrowing. I said something like: but if we had to leave this flat it would be OK because then you’d get all the rent back and we could rent somewhere else. She looked at me like I was an alien – what planet was I living on? This was a common experience, since we were not so far apart in age and she often seemed surprised that I did not already know the things she knew – that I was in fact a child. She explained that you don’t get rent back – you give it to the people who own