This theme explores how tenants’ housing choices are shaped by aesthetics, space needs, affordability, sharing arrangements, and changing accessibility requirements, highlighting constraints from income, competition, and landlord policies.
Identity and home: A sense of home can help tenants thrive, and depends on personalisation, pets, gardens, community, and security; restrictions, instability, and stigma undermine identity and wellbeing.
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Property Condition: Tenants report mixed satisfaction; many face damp, mould, cold homes, and disrepair, causing health and mental strain, with limited landlord accountability.
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Tenants’ property choices reflect aesthetics, space needs, affordability, and changing circumstances, with challenges including overcrowding, poor conditions, limited choice, landlord restrictions, and accessibility for older or disabled renters.
Tenants were often specific about their preferred property types and locations, with aesthetic and lifestyle choices important to their sense of wellbeing. Suffolk offers rural, coastal, and urban living, and several renters wanted access to nature, open space, attractive cottages and houses, or peace and tranquillity.
A few tenants are also landlords, living in properties they might struggle to buy, often in remote rural locations. One interviewee moved from a city to a rural cottage, where they enjoyed the tranquillity and friendliness. Harsh winters in a cold and drafty property with poor heating prompted a move to a more modern property in a market town.
Most tenants interviewed had sufficient living space, although overcrowding was a frequent problem raised in the focus groups by residents from the Roma community, highlighting the overlapping impact of low income and marginalised ethnicity. Several share rooms with children or small apartments with adult, sometimes married, children or other families.
Outdoor space is an essential property characteristic for many tenants, and most wanted to be creative gardeners rather than just undertaking maintenance. Others wanted a garage, and several tenants are renting properties with additional rooms to give space for hobbies, work, or guests.
Some tenants could afford, while others had to stretch their budgets, to choose areas or property types that were more expensive, preferring the location or quality that the additional rent would bring. Often, they felt they had no choice in order to provide a home of appropriate size and standard for their family.
Tenants with plans to buy a property focused on finding ‘home enough for now’. For others, choice is constrained, especially by affordability. Most tried to balance cost with location and quality, remaining near family, friends, or facilities, although a few found themselves more isolated – a considerable distance from children’s schools for example.
The choices for people facing homelessness or living in temporary accommodation are limited by availability at a low enough rent and sufficient space. This often means relying on parts of the rental market where substandard conditions are normalised.
A few experienced very high levels of competition for available properties, particularly in the aftermath of Covid, but it was not a common experience.
The attitude of landlords to pets can create direct barriers which limit choice. For one tenant, the need for a decent home meant the emotional, ‘heart wrenching’ pain of having to rehome a dog due to a landlord’s no-pet policy. For another, it meant compromising on quality and location, accepting a property in poor condition – with damp, broken fixtures, inadequate heating, and the same poor state of cleanliness the last tenant left it in – so he could keep his dog.
For some single people, renting a property of sufficient quality in the area they wanted was only affordable by sharing with somebody they knew, or found through online services. For those on low incomes, already established HMOs or bed-sits were the only option. Some HMO tenants were concerned about limited privacy due to shared kitchens and bathrooms, exposure to anti-social behaviour from other residents, lack of outdoor space, and shortcomings in building security, which in turn contributed to a sense of vulnerability to break-ins.
For older and disabled tenants, property characteristics can determine whether it can provide a long-term home. In urban locations, some tenants live in blocks of flats catering specifically for older people or have ground floor flats enabling them to cope with restricted mobility. Others live in properties where they can cope for now but where access difficulties, staircases or inaccessible bathrooms may make it difficult in future. While some have had minor adaptations made, they understand that major adaptations are likely to be required in future. A few thought their landlord might be amenable but had not yet approached them.
Some older or disabled tenants worried that their landlords might see them as a risk and end their tenancy, an illustration of how age, disability, and unfair housing systems can combine to make their situation more insecure.
Safe Suffolk Renters’ valuable resources and advice will help you rent your home with confidence.
Our research collected more detailed information on key themes which are illustrated with case studies.
A sense of home can help tenants thrive, and depends on personalisation, pets, gardens, community, and security; restrictions, instability, and stigma undermine identity and wellbeing.
Tenants report mixed satisfaction; many face damp, mould, cold homes, and disrepair, causing health and mental strain, with limited landlord accountability.
Tenants face varied affordability challenges, balancing rent with sacrifices, benefits reliance, arrears risks, and barriers to moving or homeownership despite budgeting efforts.
