The housing plans we’re looking for in the York SU election

Housing is always a big topic at uni - when rents come out each year, everyone is up in arms about just how expensive things are getting. We’ve seen that the prices of student homes are soaring past inflation, considerably faster than other rents in the city.

When it comes to the York SU elections, every year candidates have the chance to pitch their ideas for how to fix housing. But what ideas actually work, and which are doomed to fail?

What we’ve seen before

Aside from vague rhetoric to ‘pressure the University’ or ‘fight for students’, messaging from past Sabbatical Officers when it comes to solving the city’s student housing crisis has focussed on campaigning for cheaper accommodation on campus, and putting pressure on the private landlords to improve standards.

Some, including current Union Affairs Officer Lewis Parrey, have focussed around campaigning nationally for maintenance loan increases and stronger support funds. Community & Wellbeing Officer Freddy Russell has set up a community campaign group to "share experiences, raise issues and help influence leaders". Bringing students together is a useful step forward, but campaigning for more money will always have its limits, especially on a national scale where other spending is ahead in the queue. These policies miss the fact that student renters are all competing against each other, and open up the potential for even more rent inflation.

In 2023, Pierrick Roger’s flagship ‘Rate your Landlord’ policy saw York SU work with student housing charity Unipol to set up a platform for reviewing landlords and letting agents. For the first time, students were able to compare data about the state of homes rented out by each letting agent. While focussing on quality over the debatably more important issue of price, a project of this scale is much closer to the sort of idea that can and will bring change in the student rental market. While not perfect, it was a realistic plan within the SU’s capability that ultimately engaged both students and accommodation providers.

Before that, 2020-22 President Patrick O’Donnell’s manifesto called for the Student Union to set up its own letting agency and landlord accreditation scheme - similar to the work done in cities like Leeds by Unipol. This is where landlords or letting agents can apply to be recognised by a trusted body, like a student union. It’s unclear why this never materialised, although it was likely too grand in scale to be achievable.

More attainable solutions

What all these policies fail to do is tackle the deepest root cause - supply. So far Sabbatical Officers have focussed on reducing poor quality housing by attempting to apply a social stigma to landlords who let out houses falling below basic standards. Yet York SU has always glossed over the biggest factor that is keeping standards low and pushing prices higher - the low supply of student houses.

A big problem is that Sabbs have so far been focussed on short-term goals they can achieve within their one or two years - how many landlords have been named and shamed for black mould? Has the University caved in again to keeping a handful of £99 Halifax rooms?

The housing market stands against this - changes happen over years and decades, not weeks and months. It's the boring stuff that matters - what are the City of York Council's criteria for granting HMO licences? When will planning applications be accepted or rejected? How much money is being spent on inspections?

The fact is that students and letting agents live in separate spheres - a few bad reviews aren’t going to dent a letting agent’s profits if all its competitors are also receiving similar. For a responsible independent landlord, a photo of mould in their house doing the rounds is going to prove a matter of moral shame and even embarrassment.

York SU needs to act strategically and speak to letting agents in the language they can be swayed by, that of the market. It needs to develop a long-term plan for how it will work with the council to deliver enough student accommodation - bringing student voices to the table in planning meetings and demonstrating the need for more student beds. It also needs to promote students holding their City Council to account when it comes to planning policy and house safety assessments. The planning system is notoriously complex, so what's needed is more information about why houses can't become student homes.

It will always be difficult to get money out of government for greater maintenance loans, but local policy changes to rebalance the housing market we’ve already got offer a more attainable solution that will stand firm against inflation. Many places are facing student housing problems, but the nature of the situation in York is very different to other cities.

The only way to effect change on the scale we need is going to be by making it impossible for the major letting agents to crank up prices every year. We're currently in a landlord's market, where competition is almost solely between students to find a house. Pushing the balance the other way - making landlords compete for tenants - is the best way to cause prices to fall and quality to increase on the scale that we need.