‘These are not just places for people, they are homes for humans’

Having been a tenant of social housing my whole life, I have witnessed first-hand many accounts of apathetic attitudes from landlords.

Whether it’s waiting years for simple repairs, or being turfed out altogether as an area becomes more affluent, tenants of housing associations can often feel a lack of control.

Over the past year, my housing association, Places for People, has been renovating its properties on Ashley Road.

On paper this seemed great, however the company’s lack of regard for tenants and its poor conduct throughout the project, has left myself and many other residents along the road feeling defeated.

Last winter, several people with clipboards came to my door. It was overwhelming, and in the space of about ten minutes, I was expected to choose every detail of each new room, despite being satisfied with my flat.

Residents on Ashley Road have been left feeling defeated after shoddy repairs

A lot of the material they were using looked like cheap plastic. It felt like they wanted to turn everybody’s homes into university accommodation.

I knew that the work was unnecessary and would not be an improvement. They ripped out all of the charming and built-to-last features and replaced them with dull and impersonal looking fittings.

They decided to rip out my bathroom and my kitchen simultaneously, even though I was living alone with nowhere else to stay.

I was expected to clear out both rooms in a very short amount of time and everything was moved into my living room and bedroom.

As a person diagnosed with ADHD, living in over-crowded, unorganised mess made life extremely chaotic for me.

Ruby’s old sink (left) and her new ‘improved’ sink (right)

Social housing is meant to offer accommodation to vulnerable people, and therefore has a duty of care to its tenants. Yet the people employed to carry out the works didn’t seem to have been made aware of this.

Places for People had previously assured me that the work would be finished in ten days, but it instead lasted for almost a month, during which time I developed a cough from the sheer amount of dust. I couldn’t shower, and I couldn’t use my oven.

I was never alerted when the builders were coming and going and there was a constant flow of people, producing no identification, coming in and out of my house.

I was suffering from insomnia at the time and after sleepless nights I would be constantly woken up at 8am and by loud music. It felt very invasive.

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I wasn’t the only one dealing with these issues. One Ashley Road resident, who was blind, was living with all of his things crammed into his living room and was not offered support.

The builders stored equipment in his kitchen and stopped cleaning up after themselves, even though part of the budget was supposedly being spent on cleaning. They left dangerously exposed wires and wonky plug sockets.

These were not improvements, this was a rampage of disrepair.

The fact that they were conducting themselves as if they were on a building site, rather than in vulnerable people’s homes, seemed to me to show their lack of understanding of the job.

When I voiced these concerns to a representative of my housing association, I was told that this was how builders talk.

After residents had had enough, we set up TARA (Tenants and Residents Association) to fight back against the housing association. Many people had complaints at the meetings, but one of the biggest was not being able to contact the housing association.

It felt as if there was a lack of support, and in a tragic turn of events last winter, one of my neighbours ended up taking his life. While there were other factors at play, dealing with the ongoing stress of his home being ripped apart can’t have helped.

Ruby’s kitchen originally (left) and how it has been left (right)

After finally getting through to the housing association, the contractors who had been hired for the job were dropped. As a result, all of their current projects were also dropped.

Tenants were left with kitchens and bathrooms unfinished. It has since been eight months and no work has resumed. During this time, my flat has been left half-done, with holes in the ceiling, visible plaster on the walls and without a kitchen floor.

Although I will always be grateful for my social housing tenancy, these improvements seems to have been an unnecessary waste of a large amount of money.

The residents of Ashley Road are still waiting for an apology from Places for People, as well as for our homes to be restored to their original standard.

As another neighbour said, these are not just places for people, they are homes for humans and should be treated as such.

All photos: Ruby Aafiyah

Read next:

• Where should Bristol build homes in the midst of a housing crisis?
• Design competition launched for 100 per cent affordable housing scheme
• Residents of low priority housing ‘unlikely’ to find new home

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