Social landlords have prostituted themselves over ‘Build to Rent’

Last weekend a group of young professionals, forced by a spiralling housing market to rent rooms in shared houses at exorbitant prices, moved into a new development in London’s Stratford East — an area booming in the wake of the 2012 Olympics. To mark their arrival, they held a housewarming party.

But these youngsters had not rented their own home in Stratford. Instead, the group of housing campaigners had entered the development to hold a party in protest at the government’s failure to tackle the rising cost of rent — and role of social landlords in that failure.

The development in question was an apartment block designed for private rent on the open market, but built and managed by Genesis Housing Group, a social housing provider. Rents on a two-bedroom property reportedly start at £1,700 a month. Based on affordability criteria set out by housing charity Shelter (roughly, that housing costs should only consume 35 per cent of take home pay) these properties would only be affordable to families with an income of £76,000.