Nine out of 10 shared houses don’t have a living room. Here’s why we need them

Landlords are turning communal space into bedrooms, depriving tenants of somewhere to socialise. What does this mean for the health and happiness of Generation Rent?

If confirmation were needed that the shared house is no longer a home but a collection of sleeping spaces designed primarily to make your landlord even richer, stand by for depressing news about the death of the living room.

According to an analysis of house-sharing websites advertising rooms for rent, 90% advertised in London had no separate living room, with communal space turned into a bedroom. The research by the Times found one living room had been divided into two small bedrooms with a partition wall going across a radiator and a window. In another, the bed was centimetres from an old gas fire. Of properties that now had five bedrooms, 88% were not registered as houses in multiple occupation (HMO), which have minimum size standards, and some were illegally small.

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