With homeownership slipping out of reach for millions and soaring rents, the dearth of genuinely affordable homes is seeing property guardianship on the rise.
Property guardians live in empty or disused premises that are usually awaiting development by the landowner. UK TV viewers may be familiar with the concept from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Channel 4 comedy Crashing, which featured six young, university-educated, twenty-something artists living as guardians in a disused hospital in east London.
Despite this oft-promoted image of guardianship as an alternative lifestyle choice, across Europe many people – from key workers to students – are opting for this kind of housing solution primarily for financial reasons.
Under what are commonly termed “licence agreements”, instead of rent they pay discounted occupation fees. But these agreements do not afford the same protection from quick eviction and the right to repairs that tenancy agreements must.
My research looks at the legal complexities of guardianship. Its very existence – and its growing popularity – speaks to the wider state of housing precarity in the UK.
A Dutch import
Property guardianship emerged in the Netherlands in the 1980s as an anti-squatting measure. Squat actions had taken off in the 1960s when students in Amsterdam, faced with a dire lack of housing, criticised the city for boarding up buildings due for demolition, thereby making them uninhabitable. They called for their peers to take control of vacant premises and by 1980, the squatter movement is estimated to have counted upwards of 20,000 people among its ranks.
In the 1980s, as opposition to the movement grew, property management agencies multiplied. Working on behalf of owners, these agencies developed what became known as antikraak or “anti-squatting” strategies, recruiting people to live in abandoned schools, leisure centres, monasteries and even former police stations. They paid no rent, only utility bills. And they enjoyed neither privacy nor protections – evictions could happen with only two weeks’ notice.
