Has the student housing crisis improved in Durham? Katie Porteous, IF student intern and Durham student, investigates.
The student housing crisis
The UK student housing crisis is characterised by soaring rents and stagnant maintenance loans. Students face huge financial strains, with over one third of current students struggling to afford their housing costs. Driven by a severely constrained housing supply and rent increases far outpacing maintenance loan adjustments, the student property market is becoming increasingly inaccessible, effectively pricing out the poorest students.
The housing crisis in Durham
Since 2003, the number of students in Durham City has increased by just over 85%, from 11,868 to 21,960, with the number predicted to increase by a further 40% over the next 10 years. This increase in the student population has caused the housing market to become intensely competitive because there is simply not enough private rental accommodation for the number of students. It means that there is immense pressure on current students to secure the most affordable properties quickly for the next academic year.
Durham City even tends to hit the national news because of its student housing crisis. This is because private sector accommodation is released by lettings’ and estate agents in a process known as ‘the drop’, whereby multiple rental properties are advertised around the same time. This causes a student rush to try and get adequate and affordable housing during the early stages of first term.
Overnight queues
In 2022, students queued outside housing agencies overnight amid rent rises and claims of a lack of supply. Subsequently, a voluntary “Student Letting Code of Practice” was introduced by the university, the local council and the university student union, which aimed to encourage landlords and lettings’ agencies to spread the availability of student housing more evenly across the year and thereby prevent unfair pressure being placed on students to sign leases too early in the academic year. It also addressed issues around contracts such as repairs and maintenance and unclear clauses. However, several lettings’ and estate agents pulled out and the code failed to attain its intended impact.
Although the code has worked to some degree with overnight queues no longer hit the national news, students still feel the same pressure to sacrifice lectures and college mealtimes in order to hunt down housing. Furthermore, the scramble by first-year students to obtain a house means that they are pressured into living with other students they have just met, in some cases, just for one or two weeks. The rush can lead to dysfunction and distress if expectations of household dynamics, ie how bills are shared or how much energy the household uses, differ. It’s not an issue that gets any easier over time. For example, a final year student reported to the Durham student paper, The Palatinate, that “The housing crisis in Durham is the reason I have decided not to do a masters.”. The housing crisis is more than a once-a-year stressful experience for students; it can significantly impact their likelihood to attend and continue attending higher education.
Exploited by high rents for damp and mould
Durham students feel that they face an unfair playing field by finding themselves too often at the mercy of landlords driving up the price of student housing because they can. Durham Tenants’ Union has gone as far as to say that, “Landlordism is fuelled by exploitation and an imbalance of power in order to make profit.” . Furthermore, students end up accepting poor living conditions with some students ending up living in mouldy, damp, rodent-ridden accommodation even though rental prices continue to increase.
Rising rents
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported an annual increase of 9.2% in Durham private rents in February 2024, which is 1.5% higher than the rest of the Northeast. Rents will undoubtedly increase even more in 2025/6. While rents continue to climb, student maintenance loans have not kept pace with students due to receive a mere 3.1% increase in 2025/6.
Part-time work is a necessity for many
High housing costs mean that many students have resorted to taking up part time jobs. Close to half of all Durham students now work more than 12 hours a week to cover the rising cost of rent and other living expenses. The struggle to balance a job and academic work can greatly compromise the quality of students’ studies and disproportionately affect those students’ whose families are unable to cover the difference between maintenance loans and the reality of rental costs. Unless students living costs fall, higher education will increasingly become the preserve of the wealthy.
What needs to change?
Since we live in a market economy in which the cost of goods is led by supply and economists argue that rent controls do not work, how then can we bring down the cost of student housing in university towns and cities? One answer is to increase the supply of both student and private rental housing. That means building more student blocks and building more private sector rental homes. Such action would also reduce the cost of housing for the local non-student population as well: a double win.
The burden of affording student housing is a generational issue. For those over 55 years of age, student housing was not only more affordable but was also covered by universal “student grants”, which were provided free by the government and paid via general taxation. From the early 2010s onwards, recent cohorts of students have faced increasingly unaffordable housing costs while receiving less and less in government support. Current maintenance loans simply do not cover the increasing cost of rent and essentials. There needs to be a middle way, one where: maintenance loans increase substantially so that students are not forced to rely on their families; poorer students are not priced out of higher education; and landlords face greater competition and therefore lower rents through the increased supply of new housing.
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Photo courtesy of: https://npf.durhamcity.org.uk/plan2019/2019-chapter-4/2019-theme-4/2019-policy-d3/