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Unusual homes for young professionals, from yurts to horseboxes（754 words）
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Horseboxes are prison cells on wheels. So says Joe, a 26-year-old press officer who lived in one for six months in south-east London. The flimsy fibreglass walls are punctuated by too few windows, he says, and sounds from outside seem to get amplified by the narrow ventilation slits. Horses hate them too, apparently.
Joe — who doesn’t want to give his surname — describes how London’s high rents forced him to take up residency in the trailer, which was parked on a patch of concrete in Bermondsey beside a mechanic’s workshop. The horsebox is still there today, he says, but Joe, a Cambridge graduate, has since moved to Berlin in search of a more affordable life.
“My job changed from four days a week to one day a week without any warning at all,” he says. “I thought I could [use] my savings for a bit but there’s no forgiveness in London.”
Joe first moved into the home of a family friend, hoping his work would pick up. When it didn’t, he was offered the horsebox. So began six months of showering at friends’ houses, dodging rats and having no access to WiFi. “The final straw was when the roof started to leak right on to the bed,” he says.
Joe is one of a growing number of young professionals in major world cities who have been pushed out of “normal” accommodation by rising rents.
In Greater London, the average price of a single room in a shared house — the most common way young professionals rent in the capital — stood at £563 a month in January, according to the UK Valuation Office Agency. In inner London the figure is higher: £710 for Islington and £724 in Camden, the latter of which is more than 42 per cent of the median take-home pay of Londoners aged 22 to 29, based on figures from the Office for National Statistics. Renting a one-bedroom flat in Shoreditch would be impossible for such a person: it would cost 115 per cent of net median income.
The problem is not limited to the UK capital. American Pete D’Andrea was 28 when he worked as a contractor for Google as a technician in the company’s self-driving car unit in Silicon Valley.
Yet for the first two years after moving to the west coast, Pete and his wife Kara had to live in a Winnebago motor home in Google’s car park. He used to shower using a bottle of soapy water while his wife splurged on a membership at a nearby gym (with a shower).
“I was a temp earning $15 an hour working 80 to 90 hours a week,” he says. “When I realised I couldn’t afford anywhere, my manager said: ‘Oh that’s OK, you can bring your RV [recreational vehicle] and park it in the parking lot’.”
In San Francisco — where a lot of tech workers live — the cost of renting has risen sharply in the past five years, pricing out many people. While growth slowed last year, the median monthly rent was $3,371 in December 2016, equivalent to 44 per cent of monthly income in the area, according to real estate website Trulia.
Nested, the property agency, ranks San Francisco as the most expensive city in the world in which to rent, calculating that the average single resident will need to earn $86,000 a year to afford a place of their own. In March last year, one man in the city made national news when it emerged he was paying $400 a month to live in a wooden box in a friend’s sitting room.
Ralph McLaughlin, chief economist at Trulia, points to the relatively small increase in median annual incomes compared with median rents. A look at Craigslist, a popular website for finding accommodation, turns up multiple listings for bunk beds in shared rooms at more than $800 a month.
“On the supply side, the Bay Area has done little to meet demand with new construction adequately,” says McLaughlin.
Back in the UK, Vivian Le Vavasseur, a 26-year-old Oxford graduate, works as a musician and tutor. He lives in a yurt (a large round tent) in his friend’s garden in south-west London.
He moved into the yurt in February in order to sub-let his room and reduce his rent from £550 a month to £200.
“Living in a house [in London] you just accept that your rent is going to be this much and energy this much . . . it ends up being more than half your income,” he says.
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