Renting: Multicultural Edition

Ten to a room? Import the third world, get third world standards!

A couple of months ago, it was uncovered that newly elected Labour MP Jas Athwal had been renting out over a dozen flats where many of these properties were unlicensed, riddled with mould, and swarming with ants.  

While it’s easy to be offended by the appalling living standards he provides for his tenants, Mr Athwal is an ambassador of the growing class of new “Britons” he represents. Perhaps it's time to set aside our Western privilege and accept that embracing multiculturalism might also mean tolerating black mould and insect infestations!

The current housing crisis has led to many renters having very little choice over their accommodation. Tight government red tape restricts the supply side, and mass immigration increases the pressure on the demand side. This has given landlords the whip hand over renters, allowing them to charge an arm and a leg for rent and leaving them high and dry when the property has any issues. 

The reality of a renter in multicultural London isn’t just sharing a flat with your friends like the early noughties sitcoms presented. Instead, it’s being crammed into a small room with a single bed, sharing a toilet with five other young professionals. And that’s standard for the middle class! The lower incomes of Britain are either crammed into council housing or living in terrible conditions. 

The Guardian reported that 160,000 people in England are crammed in unlicensed housing in squalid conditions. In a shocking example of these appalling conditions, 16 adults and five children were crammed into an 11-room house, with entire families forced to share a single room. 

One of the most common London boroughs for this exploitation is Haringey in North London, which just so happens to be the 5th most ethnically diverse borough in the country, with over 65% of residents being non-White British. Since May 2021, 43 fines have been issued to landlords running unlicensed HMOs. The officers uncovering these accommodations found three or four, or sometimes whole families, were sharing a single room.

One dramatic example: eighteen Bangladeshis lived in a two-bedroom flat in Tower Hamlets. This was only uncovered after the property was set on fire, killing one of the inhabitants. Some of these were students, and some of these were UberEats and Deliveroo delivery couriers. They were living in bunk beds with sometimes ten people in a room.

However, this isn’t exclusive to the private sector. Earlier this year, the Sun reported on a single mum of four, Manuella Akona, sleeping in the same room with all her children. Akona is on benefits and has been waiting for a council house for six years. Within the same month, the Sun also covered another single mum, Divine Doti, on benefits with two sets of twins who were told she would have to wait eleven years for a larger home. 

Both were in London, where over 300,000 were on a waiting list for social housing. In London, almost half of the social housing is owned by someone foreign. African-born households, in particular, have some of the highest rates of social housing occupancy. For example, 73.9% of Somalis in London live in social housing. The questions must be asked. Why are people who cannot afford to live in Britain moving to the country in the first place? And why is the British government promoting immigration from those who can’t afford to live here?

The average white British London household is probably composed of working professionals in a flatshare. It’s hard to find a young white British person with a child living in London unless they are either extremely rich or poor. Most who can’t afford it have moved out of the city. Meanwhile, the new Britons have a different ethos than the highly atomised native population. 

Non-white British households have a higher birth rate than British households. Non-white-British families are likelier to have households requiring more space than the average British home. Most British houses have five rooms at most. Meanwhile, non-white-British families are having families that exceed this. An example is when the council tried to accommodate a family of eight into two houses on different sides of a dual carriageway since they couldn’t find a house big enough.

Our multicultural new residents are providing a new, updated look at what it means to be a British household. In the UK, Black people are disproportionately represented among single-parent households. South Asian households are more likely to live with their extended families. The National Centre for Social Research reported on South Asian backgrounds: “Participants’ cultural conceptions of the family (which include the importance of familial, social bonds and non-nuclear family structures) often meant that they required additional space within the home.” and “The Bedroom Standard criteria do not reflect participants’ understanding of ‘overcrowding’.”​​

Import the third world, get third world standards. 

Not only are immigrant tenants OK with lower-quality housing, but over the past year alone, there has been a trend of non-white landlords putting their renters in properties with poor conditions. These landlords would profit by cramming renters into a small property - giving slumdog millionaire a whole new meaning!

Here are some stories of nightmare landlords packing in tenants like sardines that have been reported just in the last year:

• In Hayes, a landlord named Tarsem Dhillon was fined for cramming fourteen people in a home made for six. 

• In Camden, landlord Alvaro Odeh-Torro was fined for “packing too many people in two homes—one of which had a faulty fire door.” 

• In Wembley, tenants reported a rat infestation, a leak, and a broken toilet, leading officers to raid the property belonging to landlord Sanjay Patel. They found eight people crammed in a semi-detached house that only had capacity for five.

• In Sudbury, landlord Yehuda Levhar was fined after he was found illegally renting out a large shed in north-west London as five flats.

Why is there a pattern here? If it were just landlords taking advantage of their renters’ desperation, then we would see landlords of all ethnicities overpacking their properties. But this isn’t the case. Instead of the magic soil bringing the new Britons to British standards, we are reversing to third-world standards. The new living standards are making black mould seem like a minimal issue. 

With it being known that hundreds of thousands are living in squalor conditions, yet only a handful of landlords are being held by the law, it makes you wonder why the law is there in the first place. The state is establishing a new norm by allowing the housing market to become oversaturated, leaving renters with limited options, and introducing a new demographic accustomed to lower living standards than those in Britain. Does sharing a mouldy room with five others look like progress to you?