Towards the midpoint of the term the freshers of York will typically be feeling more settled. The posters are up, the lectures which can be absorbed with a hangover have been identified, and the wildly prejudicial and misinformed assumptions about each other based on that first game of ring of fire have solidified. Gone are the delusions that they will have a sit down house meal once a week, and the freshers’ cough will be retreating to a wheezy chuckle. In the coming months however, they will be looking for their route out of halls into one of York’s student houses. To do this they will have to find a selection of unobjectionable housemates. These must be whittled out from the raw block of potentially pleasant or toxic personalities with which they were presented on their first day.
Unfortunately the decision is not so simple as ‘who do I want to live with?’ or even ‘who would want to live with me?’ so much as ‘who do I want to have to live with?’ and ‘who will definitely want to live with me?’. The reason for this is that the estate agents of York use ‘joint’ tenancy agreements which bind together these freshers until the summer of their second year.
In a style particular to the student market, these agreements ensure that the responsibility for rent payments falls upon the entire tenant group (as well as their collective guarantors). Responsibility for the rent is not split equally by means of the contract and should one housemate want to move houses, drop out of university or simply refuse to pay rent then a landlord or agency can pursue that money through any of the remaining guarantors or tenants without any emphasis necessarily being placed on the tenant causing the problem. If you dropped out of a standard non-student house share it would be highly unusual for the accountant or trainee teacher you might live with to have to scramble around to find a roommate before the landlord pursues them for his or her missing percentage. The choice of housemates needn’t necessarily hinge on financial stability. For students however, it is no longer enough to avoid housemates with ominously powerful speakers, inadequate personal hygiene or a penchant for noisy copulation. You must now also avoid those more likely to leave. Namely those who are struggling or unhappy. This seems an unnecessarily cynical and unkind estimation to ask of people who have known each other for three months.
Joint tenancy agreements are useful to allow for minor rent negotiations within the house ‘we’ll all pay an extra £2 per week because Jason’s room is like a shelf in a morgue and that’s not fair etc’, and they ring-fence the landlords income against students’ often turbulent financial management.
However, as well as these pragmatic advantages, they can also trap students between an unbearable home life and an unviable financial option. When implementing this financial bond between them, they make no room for the fragility of newly formed student relationships. The shared monetary burden which can arise when a tenant wants to leave also means that spontaneity in housing choices is a luxury in which wealthy students can more readily indulge. I don’t have a solution to this problem that could satisfy both the students and the letting agencies/landlords and this is just a very poorly researched opinion piece, but given that the student market isn’t going anywhere fast, maybe it would be possible to let students pick their roommates on likeability and a suitably fastidious attitude to washing up. And let them sign a contract based on their own finances without keeping an eye on their friends’.