Build, Baby, Build: The rental market and the rise of the DFL (that’s down from London)
A rental market that drains bank balances and instils constant dread of eviction is driving people away from London. The capital can’t survive unless it can sustain its young workers, says Morgan Jones
I lived in London for the best part of a decade, and for most of that time assumed that I probably always would, not out of well-I’m-here-now passivity, but real enthusiasm. I love London; I love going on the tube in winter and I love the parks in summer at dusk. But I don’t live there anymore, because the city in the right light can be heaven, but the rental market is hell.
It’s money, of course. In my final year at university in 2018 I lived in a shared flat at the top of Brick Lane; rent was £500 a month plus fairly minimal bills. In 2023 I lived in a (significantly less well connected) shared flat in Camberwell and paid £740 a month, plus varying but distinctly unminimal bills. My income has stayed pretty flat across my 20s, liveable but not keeping pace with London’s spiralling prices. But it wasn’t, in bald terms, the money that prompted my decision to leave: it was the market, the uncertainty, the ever-present possibility of eviction (I’d had it happen before, and there was always the thought: what if the landlord wants to sell, or to move their family in? Or jack up the rent massively?) followed by the ordeal of finding a new place.
It was bad enough when I last rented in London in 2021 (fraught mass viewings and competitive applications based on income were the order of the day), but watching friends trying to rent in the ensuing years I could see that it was getting worse and worse. I’m lucky in that I mostly work remotely, and when my contract came up I decided to leave. For around half of what I was paying in London, I’m now one of the hoard of DFLs (that’s Down From Londons) on the Kent coast. It’s nice here, by the sea. While I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the city, a moment’s reflection on what it would actually be like to try and find a new place in London is enough to make me discard the idea entirely.
A drained bank balance and a constant low-level fear about having to move at short notice are not conducive to people like me, who have the option to leave, staying in London. The housing market is an active deterrent to people moving to London, staying in London, working and spending money in London. I don’t want to be overly mercantile; the city is more than the economic exchanges of its young middle classes. However, it remains true that a capital which can’t hold onto young people with good jobs is a capital that is not thriving, nor is it likely to do so in the near future unless the trend is seriously addressed.
Solving the housing crisis has not been a priority for successive Conservative administrations. They committed to banning no-fault evictions in 2019, but comprehensively failed to actually do it while also allowing Nimby backbenchers to get rid of housebuilding targets. Our almost-Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised a politics that treads a little more lightly on people’s lives; if Labour can make good on their housing offer (which includes the no-fault eviction ban and a plan to build 1.5m homes in the next parliament) and begin to relieve the pressure that housing stress places on my life and the lives of everyone I know, he will have gone a significant way towards doing just that.
Morgan Jones is a freelance journalist and former Labour aide. She is a contributing editor of Renewal