Home Sharing in the UK
The two great challenges home sharing aims to solve in the UK are split along generational lines.
For the older members of society, many are faced with the prospect of living alone, with little support in basic tasks like cooking, cleaning, or shopping, whilst for young people, a real challenge lies in finding affordable housing and eventually breaking onto the property ladder.
Share My Home aims to combat loneliness and the challenge of affordable living by matching elderly people living alone with young people searching for a place to live. By inviting a young person into their home who can offer companionship and support in exchange for cheap living costs, home sharing offers both sets of people an opportunity to improve their respective living situations enormously.
The UK is a country particularly susceptible to these two, relatively new issues, thanks to an ageing population, rising house prices and, of course, in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic.
We need to ask ourselves why home sharing is such an essential concept in the UK by first considering the very problems it aims to solve.
Loneliness in the UK
According to the NHS, there are over 2 million people over the age of 75 that are living alone in the UK. That’s 2 million elderly people who don’t speak to others on a daily basis, who may be less familiar with the technologies that keep us connected, who are more vulnerable to Covid-19 and therefore less likely to go out.
Approximately 1 million of those same people over 75 say they can go an entire month without speaking to another person, leaving them isolated and often unable to call on help in the event of an accident or an emergency.
The seemingly inevitable second lockdown in the UK will only exacerbate this problem. The first lockdown in the spring of 2020 resulted in rates of loneliness skyrocketing. Younger people living alone or with strangers meant that people of all ages were experiencing feelings of isolation, and the anxiety and depression that can come with it.
With areas like Liverpool, Manchester and South Yorkshire already in tier 3 of lockdown, we could be looking at a long winter for many.
The UK’s Affordable Housing Problem
Ask virtually any individual living independently between the ages of 18-26 what their biggest expenditure is, and the likelihood is that you’re going to hear one resounding answer – rent.
London, in particular, has a serious issue when it comes to living affordably. As a city where huge numbers of young people from all over the country come to work, many find themselves paying extortionate amounts towards simply having a roof over their heads.
When upwards of half a wage is going on rent, saving towards a mortgage can seem a distant dream, rather than an achievable reality. Most young working people in London are left with one of two choices: commute long distances and spend more time and money on travel, or shell out most of their hard earned cash every month.
Of course, the problem is not limited to London.
In Manchester, 1 in 102 people are currently homeless. In Birmingham, that number is 1 in 66. Rates of homelessness is steadily increasing year on year particularly in cities where high rent prices are driving younger people to the street.
None of these stats even take into account the ‘hidden homeless’, people who aren’t necessarily out sleeping rough, but are sofa surfing, staying on floors or in other unofficial accommodation.
These are the measures taken by many young people to live feasibly close to their work, without having to pay high rent prices. With the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic just starting to take hold, the problem is only going to get worse.
13.4% of economically active people between the ages of 16-24 are currently unemployed, rising dramatically from the start of the year compared to the rest of the UK, where only 4.1% of the population are unemployed.
This has led to more than one in 3 young people saying they would “give up my dream job for any job", conjuring up concerns for a ‘lost generation’.
Home sharing in the UK is, in our eyes, an effective and elegant solution to both of these issues.
Home Sharing as a Solution in the UK
So how can home sharing in the UK help solve the urgent crisis of loneliness, and the affordable housing issues faced by younger people in Manchester, Birmingham and especially London?
We identify elderly people living alone, but with space in their houses for someone else to live, and carefully matching them with young people struggling to find an affordable place to live. By opening up their homes to young people looking for a place to live, elderly residents living alone can invite companionship into their lives, someone to support them and offer genuine friendship in their later years.
For young people, in return for offering basic support such as cooking, shopping or even helping with basic IT skills, they can live somewhere comfortable, affordable, and enjoy living close to where they work for a fraction of what they would otherwise be paying.
This can bring a huge amount of comfort not just to older people living alone, many of whom are comforted just by the knowledge that someone they trust is sleeping in the next room, but also to their families.
Many families in the UK live fair distances from elderly relatives, and having a younger person keeping them company provides great peace of mind for those that simply can’t visit their parents or grandparents regularly.
“Dad seems much happier. He enjoys the company and he and Greg have become close. As an only child, the responsibility is all on me. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.” – Son of one of our homesharers
For our young homesharers, those who arrive in order to offer companionship and support in return for comfortable, affordable housing and the chance to offer something tangible to their local community, the benefits can be endless.
Paying less for their rent suddenly makes saving easier. It makes it easier to live on lower wages in a career they truly love. Home sharing allows them to spend less time commuting and more time doing the things they love to do.
Our aim is to find as many compatible home shares as possible, so that elderly people living alone can have a new lease of life, and so that the younger generation can start to aspire to do the things they love again, defying the pessimism surrounding Covid-19 and an ever more challenging economic landscape.
And it’s essential to point out that, beyond the obvious practical benefits of home sharing, the true value of home sharing goes a lot deeper.
We work hard to ensure that a householder, the individual opening up their home, and the home sharer, the individual moving in, are matched to give them the best chances of genuinely getting on and establishing a real human connection.
In a time where it’s easy to become isolated, anxious and depressed, and with many challenges around the corner for the UK, it’s important that we are all surrounded by people who can make our lives better.
Whether that’s the lights being on and your house being warm after a long day at work, spending quality time playing games or watching TV together in the evening, or enjoying a home-cooked meal together, our home sharers could provide countless examples of the small changes that make huge improvements to their lives, and we don’t see why this shouldn’t continue.