Renting a Flat

In my home there is a small kitchen. There are two bedrooms. The kitchen is bright. The bedroom is quiet. I like my home because it is near the park.

Dear Mrs Costa,

My name is Anna. I saw your flat online and I am very interested in it. I am a teacher and I work in the city centre. I would like to come and see the flat this week, if it is possible. I am free on Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning. Could you tell me — is the flat furnished, and are pets allowed? I have a small cat.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Anna

The first flat I ever rented was a small one above a busy bakery in my hometown. I was twenty-two, I had just started my first real job, and I was so pleased to have a place that was mine that I did not, at the viewing, notice some things I should have noticed.

The flat had two important problems. The first was that the bakery began at four in the morning, and the smell of bread — which sounds wonderful — was actually overwhelming if you lived directly above it, and on summer days made the whole flat smell of yeast in a way that became hard to live with. The second was that the only window in the bedroom faced an internal courtyard, so there was no real morning light, and in winter the bedroom felt like a small dark cave.

I lived there for two years. I learned to like the bakery, eventually — the bakers were friendly, and I sometimes got free bread on Saturdays. I never quite learned to like the dark bedroom. I left the flat slightly happier than I had been when I moved in, but a little wiser about what 'a flat above a bakery' actually means in daily life.

What I would now look for, that I did not know to look for then, is whether the bedroom has a window facing the open sky. Almost everything else can be lived with. That, in my limited experience, cannot.

When I was twenty-three, I went to see a small flat in a neighbourhood I had been wanting to live in for two years. The advert had been online for less than a day, and I rushed across the city in the rain to be the first to view it. I was met at the door by the landlord, an older man in a clean shirt who looked at my wet shoes for slightly longer than was comfortable, and then ushered me in.

The flat itself was perfect — small, light, with a window that opened onto a quiet street and a kitchen that someone had clearly thought about. I was prepared, within four minutes of arriving, to take it. The landlord, however, did not seem prepared to let me. He answered my questions with a particular kind of brevity that suggested he had answered them too many times that week and was tired of the form. When I asked about the previous tenant, he said only that 'there had been a misunderstanding'. When I asked about the deposit, he said it was 'standard'. When I asked, with as much politeness as I could muster, what was meant by 'standard', he sighed audibly.

I did not get the flat. Or rather, I did not pursue the flat, after a further ten minutes of brief answers and slightly impatient gestures. I left feeling that I had failed an examination I had not, until I arrived, known I would be sitting. I walked back across the city in the same rain, and arrived at my old flat — which I had been keen to leave — feeling, briefly, fond of it.

What the experience taught me, that I would not otherwise have learned, is that the flat is not the thing you are choosing. The flat is the easy part. The thing you are choosing is the person who will, for as long as you live there, hold a small but real piece of your life in their decisions about heating, repairs, late payments, and whether to renew. A perfect flat with a difficult landlord is, I learned that afternoon, worse than an imperfect flat with a kind one. I have, since, given the question of who is showing me the flat at least as much attention as the question of what is in it, and have, on the whole, found better homes as a result.

When I was twenty-three, I went to see a small flat in a neighbourhood I had been wanting to live in for two years. The advert had been online for less than a day, and I rushed across the city in the rain to be the first to view it. I was met at the door by the landlord, an older man in a clean shirt who looked at my wet shoes for slightly longer than was comfortable, and then, without saying so, decided I would not be removing them. The first piece of information I had about the tenancy was therefore that I was being asked to walk on his carpet in shoes I would not have walked on my own carpet in.

The flat itself was, by the standards of that part of the city, almost perfect. Light from two directions. A small kitchen that someone had thought about. A bedroom that did not face an internal courtyard, which in that neighbourhood was already a luxury. I was prepared, within four minutes of arriving, to take it.

The landlord, however, did not seem prepared to let me. He answered my questions with a particular kind of brevity that suggested he had answered them too many times that week, and that the answering was, for him, the unpleasant administrative work that preceded the rent. When I asked about the previous tenant, he said only that there had been 'a small misunderstanding'. When I asked about the deposit, he said it was 'standard'. When I asked, with as much politeness as I could muster, what was meant by 'standard', he sighed at a frequency that was clearly intended to be heard and then named a sum that was not, in fact, standard.

I did not get the flat. Or rather, I did not pursue it, after a further ten minutes of brief answers and slightly impatient gestures. The thing I remember most clearly, walking back across the city in the rain that I had now stopped noticing, was a slight but detectable feeling of having narrowly escaped something — although I could not, at the time, have said what.

What I now think was being negotiated, beyond the flat itself, was a particular distribution of small humiliations. The landlord's brevity, the sigh, the carpet-and-shoes calculation, the unwillingness to explain the deposit: each of these was, individually, very small, but together they were a kind of preview of how disagreements would be handled in the tenancy that did not happen. The flat was a beautiful object that came attached to a relationship that, on the available evidence, would have been an ongoing low-grade unpleasantness. The landlord had, in a sense, told me everything I needed to know in the four minutes during which he failed to ask me to take off my shoes.

What I have done differently since is to give as much of my attention to the person showing me the flat as I do to the flat itself. The flat is the easy part. The relationship is what determines whether the next two years are tolerable. I have, on the whole, found better homes as a result, although I still occasionally enter a viewing and find myself looking at my own shoes before I have looked at anything else, in a way that I am not entirely proud of. I would be interested to know whether you do the same.

I have been to perhaps twenty-five viewings, in three cities, over the last fifteen years. The one I think about most often was the seventeenth, in a city I had moved to for work and which had not, in my first month, made me feel particularly welcome. The flat had been advertised online for less than a day. The advert had a single photograph, taken at an angle that obscured what I would later realise was the absence of a window in the kitchen. The rent was a little below what comparable flats in that neighbourhood were going for. I went to the viewing at six o'clock on a Wednesday evening, in the particular kind of gentle drizzle that makes a person look more tired than they are.

I was met at the door by a man in his fifties who introduced himself by his surname only, and who looked at my wet shoes for slightly longer than was comfortable before, without saying anything, deciding I would not be removing them. The first piece of information I had about the tenancy was therefore that I was being asked, by silent decision, to walk on his carpet in shoes I would not have walked on my own carpet in. I noticed it. I did not say anything.

The flat itself was, by the standards of the neighbourhood, almost good enough. The kitchen had no window, but the living room had two; the bedroom faced a courtyard, but the courtyard was reasonably quiet. I was prepared, within five minutes, to take it. The landlord, however, did not seem prepared to let me. He answered my questions with a particular brevity that suggested he had answered them many times that week and that the answering was, for him, the unpleasant administrative work that preceded the rent. When I asked about the previous tenant, he said only that there had been 'a small misunderstanding'. When I asked about the deposit, he said it was 'standard'. When I asked, with as much politeness as I could muster, what was meant by 'standard', he sighed at a frequency that was clearly intended to be heard and then named a sum that was higher than the legal maximum.

I am writing this in the register that this kind of essay calls for, which is a careful adult one in which the writer tells a small story, draws a small lesson, and refuses to dramatise either. I am aware of the register, and I am aware that the awareness is itself part of the register. I would say in my own defence that I am also aware that the register is, in this case, the most accurate one available to me — what happened in that flat was small, slow, accumulated, and almost imperceptible, and a more dramatic register would falsify the texture of it.

What I now believe was being negotiated, beyond the flat, was a particular distribution of small humiliations. The shoes, the brevity, the sigh, the slightly illegal deposit, the unspoken assumption that I would not, as a young foreigner with a name he had visibly struggled with on the doorstep, push back on any of these — each was, individually, very small, but together they were a comprehensive preview of how disagreements would be handled in the tenancy that did not happen. The flat was a beautiful object that came attached to a relationship that, on the available evidence, would have been an ongoing low-grade unpleasantness that I would have noticed only after I had become accustomed enough to it that leaving would have felt like overreacting.

The thing I have done differently since, and what I think I had been training myself not to do for the previous sixteen viewings, is to ask the question whose answer cannot easily be faked. I now ask, near the end of every viewing, why the previous tenant left. The honest landlords answer; the dishonest ones produce one of three or four recognisable evasions, and the evasion is itself the answer. It is, I should say, a very small heuristic, and I would not want to claim it solves the problem. Most of the structural unfairness of housing remains unchanged by my having a slightly better question to ask in a slightly better order. But the question has, on three subsequent occasions, saved me from a tenancy I would have come to regret, and on two further occasions led to viewings in which the landlord visibly relaxed when I asked it, in the small specific way that suggests they had been hoping someone would. I would like to ask you, since you have read this far, whether there is a question you have been training yourself not to ask — in housing, or elsewhere — and whether the question, if you finally permitted yourself to ask it, would yield the answer you fear, or one you have not, in fact, encountered yet.