City of York Council are this month looking to impose a threshold on the number of student houses in areas close to the University.
Despite strong opposition from the University and YUSU, the Council Cabinet approved drafted plans to limit the number of HMOs in certain student-heavy areas of York to 20 per cent last Tuesday. On many streets close to the University, such as the popular Heslington Road and Thief Lane, this threshold has likely already been reached.
This decision is to coincide with the enforcement of an ‘Article 4 direction’ on 20 April, which forces landlords to seek planning permission before converting a regular house into an HMO.
Houses of Multiple Occupancy, or HMOs, are defined as those let to three or more tenants with a shared living space. In York, student lets make up the majority of these. This change in the regulation is, without doubt, aimed at limiting student housing, after residents in wards neighbouring the University have blamed students for an increase in crime, anti-social behaviour, and parking issues.
Anna-Therese McGivern, a second-year SPS student living on Hull Road said, “It seems like the council’s plans don’t take into consideration student issues at all. This will push rental costs even higher in areas like Hull Road and force students to live further away from University.”
Osbaldwick Councillor Mark Warters has supported the Article 4 direction from the start but opposes the move to bring in a threshold. He told York Press that he thought it would “open the floodgates” to student housing in wards such as his, and called for restrictions to be applied on a case-by-case basis.
YUSU President Tim Ellis told Vision: “It is very worrying to see the Council push ahead with this discriminatory piece of legislation despite the huge problems that ‘HMO thresholds’ will create. It is claimed that it isn’t an anti-student policy, yet I find it abhorrent that the Council would use legislation to ban students from living in certain areas. There is also a worry about…the changes to housing benefit that will mean we will have a huge increase in numbers of non-students needing HMOs.”