How the housing crisis is impacting culture in Manchester

In January 2024, the University of Manchester opened a light installation on its campus. “I’m meant to be here,” a line from a poem commissioned by the university in its bicentennial year, was placed in purple neon letters on a bridge linking two campus buildings. To students traipsing along the Oxford Road corridor, it’s a small act of positive reinforcement for one of the biggest, most international university communities in the country. But to others, it might seem vaguely threatening. “I’m meant to be here,” the neon sign implies, as it looks towards the increasingly studentified neighbourhood of Hulme. “And you’re not.”

As tenant organiser and writer Isaac Rose outlines in The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis, along with hyper-visible changes to Manchester’s skyline — a fixation on which masks the rise of the “build-to-rent” tower block phenomenon — there’s a slower, subtler violence of displacement in areas like Hulme, Moss Side and Rusholme, in which “gradual, gnawing and relentless pressures” drive neighbourhood change. In densely populated urban areas like these, the city’s housing crisis plays out as a complicated network of tensions — aggressive and subtle, contradictory and constructed — in which nobody on the ground ever really wins.

The Rentier City is a trip through Manchester’s history of renting, but it grapples with something much bigger. The answer to the question, why has finding a place to live become so fucking hard? is, regrettably, complicated, but in the second half of The Rentier City, Rose steadfastly tracks some of the most important factors to consider: the decline of the postwar state, the reduction in powers of local governments by national governments since the Thatcher administration, local government turning towards business when faced a lack of money for redevelopment, and, eventually, the financialisation of Britain’s housing market. Rose suggests that looking at Manchester is a particularly good way of understanding these changes. London’s housing crisis is well-publicised, but Rose asks: might Manchester have built something worse? 

Young people are on the frontline of this crisis. Along with the city’s large, condensed student population — Manchester University, Manchester Metropolitan, and the Royal Northern College of Music all lie on the same stretch of road — ONS figures from 2020 showed that the Greater Manchester city region was home to more 25 to 29-year-olds than any other UK region, with these numbers likely continuing to rise following the pandemic. Once they’re there, many young people rent. 2021 census figures show that 61 per cent of Manchester’s population rents, compared to just under half in London; yet, with Manchester’s average wages being lower than the capital, Rose cites figures which suggest the actual rent burden there is higher. Research published in summer 2023 also showed rents had increased on average by 20 per cent across the city over the past year.

It feels like multiple futile battles being fought at once: young people are forced into a studentified rental economy that accelerates social change in the locality, while facing their own set of financial difficulties as rent increases outpace flatlining wages, all as the prospect of anyone ever exiting this system — by buying property or moving into rare social housing — shrinks. Rose’s arguments are uncomfortably sober, as he sweeps away a topsoil of Mancunian myth-making to reveal the deep, man-made foundations of the city’s housing crisis. And, by understanding one city, Rose tries to put a finger on why, for so many in the UK, property is becoming impossible.

'The Rentier City', out next month with @RepeaterBooks and available to pre-order now.https://t.co/B6GV1FO2DI pic.twitter.com/yJnjlDO6dY

— Isaac Rose (@_isaacrose) January 2, 2024

We caught up with him in Manchester last month, and spoke about renting forever, the smoothing out of culture, and the hope of resistance.

Onlookers might look at Manchester, a city of new cultural infrastructure, endless new tower blocks, positive international press, and Chanel shows, and say, ‘crisis, what crisis?’. Why do you think they’re wrong?

Isaac Rose: I think on one level, they’re right. Obviously, they’ve done something remarkable in the city centre. But I think people will look at the city centre, and only that. 

The question is, ‘crisis for who, and for whom is it a success?’ For certain people living in the city centre of Manchester, I’m sure it’s really great. They’ve constructed a world where you have everything on your doorstep, with that kind of ‘urbanist’ living. But it’s quite a small section of people who can afford that. There’s a certain class faction that the city is made for, and for other people in the city, it’s terrible. The city centre has become increasingly closed off to people from outside, to other people who live in the inner city. But this is exactly what they wanted to do.

Citing historical precedents in Hulme and Wythenshawe, you’re clear in interpreting this recent social change as deliberate.

Isaac Rose: [The council] could have done it in a different way, where they would build much more social housing alongside the private development, but they deliberately chose not to do that. If they had done that, you might have seen a city where there would have been an equitable distribution of the development. But they didn’t claim Section 106 payments, they didn’t insist on affordable housing, and this is the result, I suppose: a starkly divided city. You just have to walk from here [the city centre] to Harpurhey, or Newton Heath. It’s like a different world.

“Stuff like The Warehouse Project and other big business nightlife is such a world away from the heroic era of Manchester’s music culture” — Isaac Rose

At what point did students become a key actor in Manchester’s rental landscape?

Isaac Rose: A lot of Manchester’s development strategy has been around students, and in creating a kind of pipeline.

I think the marketisation of higher education has had a massive impact, as have changes in the way universities have been run over the last ten or 15 years. I think the integration between universities as economic actors and the property agenda — either universities become property developers, or they offload their property responsibilities to private developers — seems to be the thing of the last 15 years. Also in the post-financial crash period, you get purpose-built student accommodation [PBSA] as a new kind of property classification.

It all locks together. The privatisation of higher education and the attraction of international students on higher fees creates this pool of renters who don’t necessarily know what else to do but go to the place that’s advertised to them. Particularly for that international student body, there’s then this kind of pipeline: once you move into a build-to-rent flat or co-living situation, then there’s a range of different rental products in Manchester as you go on your career journey as a young professional earning more and more money. You always stay a renter.

A key idea in the book is the formation of a new renter subject: a renter who can be relied upon to continue paying rent without the hope of exiting the rental system. How does that work in practice?

Isaac Rose: Real estate capital wants people who are very used to getting an easy landlord: log on to a website, find a landlord, get a place, and move. Everything is really easy: you pay your rent every month, get a flat, and if you don’t like the flat, there’ll always be another one to move to that’s a bit bigger. For people moving into student housing, it creates this situation where all you’ve ever known is this one way of renting and finding accommodation, and they can just take your rent off you for 20 years.

The way people in the property business are thinking is that this is the future of how many, many people in Britain will live. [Property group Savills predicts that the build-to-rent sector is set to be worth £170 billion by 2032.] PBSA becomes a sort of Praetorian Guard for the wider transformation that comes later: you put in the PBSA units, you develop this new renter subject, bring this new vibe in the neighbourhood, and, down the line, you can build build-to-rent properties. PBSA blocks are like the shock troops of the whole process.

🌍 Greater Manchester renters experienced an average rent rise of 32% over the past year according to our live survey.

How does this chime with your experiences?
Survey still open - add your voice now: https://t.co/8R2C1h5f86#GreaterManchesterRenters #GMRentersSurvey pic.twitter.com/un1nMF6UQ3

— Greater Manchester Tenants Union (@gmtenantsunion) February 22, 2024

How do you think these changes have impacted youth culture?

Isaac Rose: Space is so expensive, so the spaces of association have disappeared. It’s much, much harder to start something – I was involved in Partisan Collective [a cultural community group in Salford] for quite a long time, and it was very hard to operate that. It’s all spaces where people can meet for cheap or free that are going; that has a massive impact on culture.

In parallel, I think you’ve then got a commodification of culture which in Manchester I think is super prevalent. Stuff like The Warehouse Project and other big business nightlife is such a world away from the heroic era of Manchester’s music culture. It’s a smoothing out of culture: when culture becomes a kind of product that you buy, the way that you move through it changes, and there’s a loss of spontaneity or even danger that would have been the norm in that 80s and 90s world.

There’s a selling of a lifestyle as well. A lot of this ‘New Manchester’ stuff is about a particular lifestyle you can buy for cheaper than you could for that same lifestyle in London. And that’s why you can’t really take this issue away from the situation across the country.

The book gives a short shrift to consumer-focused ideas of gentrification. Are we getting gentrification wrong?

Isaac Rose: I think in the popular discourse, people get it wrong. Studying geography in Manchester, there was a really robust, coherent analysis of gentrification about the flow of capital, from Neil Smith and David Harvey coming out of New York in the 1980s. I do think people on the left are not that cognizant of the theoretical lens on gentrification, the city, and how class struggles play out in systems through space.

People think about gentrification as like, coffee shops, lattes, cereal cafés. But it’s a misdirection of people’s attention. Focusing on that stuff misses the real culprit: property investors, landlords, and the way in which the local state in particular has become an enabler of the “real estate state.”

If you’re a young person on the frontline of these tensions, what might you do?

Isaac Rose: First, take Hulme for example, and [the friction adjacent university] Manchester Metropolitan. No one there is really anti-student; they’re anti-university, anti-property developers, they actually think that students are being ripped off, and they feel sorry for them. Understand that you’re probably being exploited too: you’re on one side of this frontier, and they’re on the other, but you’re actually both being exploited by the same system, which is why you’re paying £250 a week on rent for a shitty flat.

Also, there’s this hypnotic thing in the way in which urban space is created today. It’s like, everything’s there for you, you can just live in this nice bubble. Try to snap out of it. If you ever feel the spark of ‘is there anything more than this?‘, try and nurture it.

The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis by Isaac Rose is published by Repeater Books today.