Notes From Evictionland

“I’m a different person now,” Mum often says. For a time, she meant that in a good way: stronger, confident, less fearful of ruffling feathers. That’s because for five years between 2017 and 2022 my mum, Hazell, was a leading figure in her community’s campaign to prevent their mass eviction. The scale of the eviction made news: There were television interviews, newspaper features, social media coverage. You name it, and she appeared in it—alongside Dad and her close neighbor friends. Mum’s wide, round eyes, tousled mane of hair, and slight smile made her a beseeching subject of campaign features. It was a mistake to confuse her reserved smile with shyness, though. As coverage snowballed, Mum grew increasingly confident about vocalizing the injustices faced by her private renting community.

Now though, she says this phrase regretfully. She feels different, but burnt and bitter. “My head’s a shed” is a favorite phrase of hers, one that seems to caveat her capacity to deal with anything these days. The adrenaline of the campaign gave way to overwhelm, which gave way to burn out and cynicism. Mum longs to turn the clock back to the time before she was forced into fight-or-flight mode. Not just because her community lost the fight in the end, and was evicted. (She’d been evicted before.) But because this time, there was a compounding weight.

Uncertainty and anxiety hung over her like a cloud as the fight dragged on with bureaucracy and appeals. Campaigning had started to take a toll on her relationships, friendships, and even her health. It seemed inevitable that everyone would lose their homes anyway, since eviction is practically baked into the way Britain manages its tenanted homes. All Mum feels she gained from fighting this one is worse mental health, more gray hairs, and a deep-seated mistrust of private and public individuals with power.

Late in the fall of 2017, my parents and sixty-nine other tenant households picked up an unaddressed leaflet that had been casually pushed through their mailbox. The glossy front page stated that their landlord, a corporate investment company called Pemberstone, was seeking planning permission to demolish their entire tenanted estate in south Leeds and build up to seventy-two new executive-style houses to put up for sale.

It wasn’t exactly an eviction notice, nor was it directly addressed to tenants. Instead, the leaflet was a generic notification of a public consultation event inviting “locals” (whoever they were, if not the tenants) to share ideas “on how the scheme can help meet the needs of the local community prior to submission of a formal planning application.” In other words, the company was seeking advice from tenants on how to demolish their homes and evict them “nicely.”

Mum felt bewildered at first. My parents and brother had lived on the estate for eleven years by that point, and some of their neighbors had been there for decades longer. Residents were settled: they’d decorated and renovated, chosen jobs nearby, raised families, and made deep friendships and memories with neighbors; even drawn lifelong friends onto the estate. It was home. Initial hope that the new properties might be rentals for existing residents gave way to shock and anger when it dawned that current tenants were expected just to shuffle silently off elsewhere.

Within weeks, they mobilized and formed the Save out Homes LS26 campaign, harnessing mainstream and social media to become a national focal point for discussions about the housing crisis. Residents were interviewed by countless journalists and, in 2020, an award-winning short documentary film was made about their fight: Hanging On by Cosmosquare Films. Its director, Alfie Barker, organized for residents to be hoisted up by cranes and filmed literally clinging onto the sides of their homes. The attention bought them time, but not security.

By early 2022, all assured shorthold-tenancy homes had received their formal Section 21 “no fault” eviction notices. Section 21s gave tenants just two months to pack up their homes and find somewhere else to live. Dozens of families have now been forced off the estate, including my parents in April 2022. Others fled before receiving the notice, knowing what was coming down the line. At the time of writing, the last shorthold-tenancy family has moved out; those remaining are a handful of families and older residents protected by a pre-1989 tenancy agreement that prevents eviction without the provision of a comparable alternative. The vacant houses surrounding these remaining residents have been boarded up, inviting vandalism, break-ins, and frequent fly-tipping. Demolition and redevelopment of the estate will commence eventually. Whatever happens from here, my parents’ community has already been destroyed.

I didn’t grow up in this house on Wordsworth Drive because, like many tenant families across the world, my family had to move around a lot due to other people’s choices. In 2005, I’d left our previous home in nearby Rothwell to go to university. But that Rothwell house was nothing more than a temporary stop-gap for my family after an unexpected no-fault eviction in 2004 forced us out of the previous house. That chaotic eviction was caused by the company that owned the house going bust. It was a tied cottage, which means our home depended on employer patronage. Mum and Dad both worked there: Dad as a caretaker (it was his job that was tied to the house); and Mum as an administrator. With the collapse of the company, not only did we lose our home, but Dad lost his job. To prevent the loss of our entire household income, Mum transferred to a sister company in Tingley, which was an hour away by two buses that each came only once an hour at best. As a non-driver, Mum relied on lifts from kind colleagues, while she frantically searched for a more commutable job. With limited options, we had to move into a much smaller semi-detached, two-bed private rental on a steep street in Rothwell, paying a hefty deposit, agency fees and six months up front in rent (pretty much all of Dad’s redundancy pay) in order to convince the landlord that we—a family of four adult-sized people with one income—were worth the renting risk. It’s all Mum and Dad could afford at the time. My parents slept in the living room on a sofa-bed, folding it away every morning and putting their duvet and pillows at the back of the room so we could watch TV and eat dinner as a family.

Our private renting experiences were not unique—not then, not 150 years ago, and not now. Some 6 percent of privately-rented houses were overcrowded between 2024-25—a figure that’s likely higher than when we lived like that in 2004-05. But frequency shouldn’t mean acceptance: it was confusing, embarrassing, and disruptive—in more ways than I’m prepared to spill onto these pages.

Mum was fifty-eight and Dad sixty-six when that long-fought notice arrived in the post: a time when they should have been making retirement plans. Instead, they began desperately searching for somewhere new to live that would take three low-income adults and a cat.

Competition for private rentals in the local area was fierce, and my parents found it hard even to book viewings; houses were gone by the afternoon they went online. It was a landlord’s market, leaving older renters—half of whom have pets, who tend to be poorer
than their homeowner counterparts, and who might require household adjustments for mobility and access—at a distinct disadvantage in the rat race.

In my parents’ search, they ruled out dozens of homes for being too expensive, then fell at the application hurdle of many more: “Too many adults,” the landlords said, “We’d prefer a young family.” Two landlords rejected their application on the assumption that three adults would mean three cars parked outside, yet there was only one driver in the household. Neither landlord bothered to ask. The two-up, two-down mid-terrace they ended up taking was one of only two they were invited to view, and Mum almost rejected it outright as the stairs are steep and narrow: she’s unsteady on her feet, and there was no banister.

With their eventual move, Mum and Dad lost so many precious things they had to throw away, give away, or just leave, because there wasn’t space in the new house. A Yamaha motorbike in bits (one of Dad’s many future ‘retirement projects’), furniture inherited from Grandad, large plant pots inherited from Nanny, gardening tools, my bed. But they made do, as they always do. It wasn’t our family’s first eviction rodeo and at least this one seemed secure. “We don’t want anyone temporary,” the new landlord insisted. “We want long-term tenants who’ll treat this place like a home.” And of course, they did.

Then, in May 2023, just one year after moving in, Dad died. Suddenly and unexpectedly, while at work. He was just sixty-seven years old, and it threw us all into a tailspin of grief and death bureaucracy. We later found out it was a heart attack and could not have been predicted; though I strongly suspect chronic stress from years of housing insecurity was a contributing factor. The British Heart Foundation recently reported that deaths of under-seventy-fives from cardiovascular disease has risen year-on-year in England since 2019, impacting the poorest the hardest. These rises have been driven by austerity
and the cost-of-living crisis: income erosion, housing insecurity, and reduced access to health and other public services. People in more deprived areas develop cardiovascular conditions ten to fifteen years earlier than people in richer ones. It is a disease of the poor in their sixties. Housing isn’t the only part of this health- deprivation story, but it’s a key one.

Dad should have retired years earlier after a lifetime spent working manual jobs, but he wanted to keep earning to cover rent and pay off debts; he was sixty-two when they first got wind of Pemberstone’s redevelopment plans, and still felt retirement was an impossible dream while they were housing insecure. His and Mum’s lifelong low wages (most recently on stagnating, bottom-rung NHS salaries) meant that neither had savings or pensions to shout about. So when Mum, my brother, and I should have been thinking about Dad’s funeral, memorials, and taking time as a small family to grieve, we were instead frantically working out how they could keep paying rent on what were now only two low incomes. I was seven months pregnant at the time and had to work midwife appointments around visits to Leeds to filter through Dad’s payslips, credit card statements, and previous employers’ pension information. After trawling through paperwork and navigating NHS death-in-service bureaucracy, it seemed OK, though. Mum and my brother could manage.

Time ticked on, as it does, despite grief. Mum deepened friendships with her new neighbors: chatting on the doorstep, watering their gardens, sharing bin duties, and even receiving reiki treatment from one neighbor who needed volunteers for her student assignment. These people offered care and support after Dad’s death, attending the funeral, dropping round to check in on Mum, offering to run her about as there was now no driver in the household. They may not have been her old neighbors in fighting, but they were starting to become her new safety net.

Then, in January 2024, Mum got news of a 7 per cent rent rise; the landlord said she needed to offset her mortgage-rate increases after the Conservative government’s disastrous 2022 mini-budget had sent interest rates skyrocketing. As always, the tenant bears the brunt of cost increases on something they don’t own. This instigated new calculations on an already squeezed household. It also created anxieties about whether Mum would be able to drop her hours for health reasons, as she’d recently been planning on. Mum is now classed as disabled due to a chronic back condition, which is daily exacerbated by severe delays in her employer’s implementation of recommended adjustments. The irony that she works for the National Health Service has not been lost on us. Mum now joins millions of other workers in cutting hours or leaving unemployment entirely due to ill health.

That rent hike wasn’t the end of it. Six months later, in June 2024—two years since her last eviction and only a year since Dad died—Mum got a text message from the landlord altering her that she needed to sell the property. So, Mum and my brother were going to be evicted again. “I can’t touch your dad’s stuff” she said in tears to me the day she received the text. Eviction notices rarely come when you’re ready.

While one landlord can’t be singlehandedly accountable for plugging the country’s glaring social house and private-rent crisis, here we are. Again. Two part-time, low-income earners, one of them now sixty with disabilities, facing another eviction. Looking around at the four—just four—private rent options currently available in their area, the cheapest costing 10 per cent more than their already increased rent, it is hard not to despair.