What I Overheard

For this short post, we are going to jump ahead by around a month, to the day I signed my tenancy agreement with LMH.

What I overheard, that morning while I was sat waiting for my appointment, confirms everything I speculated on in my previous posts, about the city council enabling housing associations to abuse vulnerable people.

When this happened, I honestly didn’t know what to make of it, in terms of whether the potential tenant was telling the truth. Regrettably, if you had asked me to guess, having no experience as a Torus tenant yet, and growing up in a housing association property that was immaculate, I would have guessed she must be lying. Mainly though, what would have swayed me more than anything else, would have been my incorrect belief that housing associations would not have been allowed to rent out dangerous properties.

The woman in question, arrived visibly upset, pushing what appeared to an almost newborn baby in a pram. She was very young. She looked to me to be in the age range of sixteen to eighteen years old.

Despite being a literal child and extremely distressed, she managed to explain her predicament particularly well to the advisor at the public help desk. Her and her daughter (the baby in the pram) where homeless and currently living in a homeless shelter, which we can all agree, is no place for either a teenager or a newborn baby. LMH had offered her a flat, which she did not bid on, and when she went to view it, it had a serious damp and mould issue in the bedroom.Understandably, because a damp and mouldy flat is not a safe place for a newborn baby to be, she had refused the offer.LMH had then gone to property pool and claimed that this literal child, who was doing what was best for her newborn baby, had refused a perfectly good property. As a result of this, because she was in band A, property pool had removed her from their website, basically sentencing these two literal children to indefinite homelessness.

When she complained about the state of the property she had been offered by LMH to property pool, to try to get back on their website, they told her that she needed to get LMH to notify them that the property they had offered her was not suitable for her, which is why she was there that morning, to request that they admit to property pool the flat they offered her was unsafe.

From what she said I immediately understood the situation she was saying they had put her in, which I now believe they had, and what she was requesting they do, yet the advisor didn’t seem to, as she kept referring the girl back to property pool, adamant that not only would they not have let her view a flat in that condition, but what ever problem she was now facing was a property pool issue, not an LMH issue.

Now, I know, due to my experience with Torus and the state of my flat not only when I viewed it but when I moved in, the advisor understood perfectly well the predicament this girl was in as a direct result of their actions, she just didn’t care.

She did not care that these two literal children were now going to be indefinitely homeless because Torus tried to take advantage of the fact they were vulnerable, and she didn’t let them.

What would baffle me about this, if I wasn’t aware of how petty and vindictive Torus staff, and Torus as an organisation are, is why they would turn away what was seemingly a long-term tenant. They could easily have offered her something suitable, right? But, they didn’t, because all their properties are dirty, run down, dangerous slums, which is how they want them, probably because it means less work and more profit for them, and if you try to defend yourself against their abusethey will punish you in any way they can.

Even if you are literal children.