'I never feel safe': meet the people at the very sharpest end of the housing crisis – disabled millennials

Finding decent accommodation is hard enough for ‘generation rent’ millennials – but for young disabled people a nightmare shortage of accessible housing is ruining lives and career prospectsWhen I first meet Kay Garner, she has been living for months out of a hospital, when she should be at home. The 27-year-old had a spinal injury in September 2017 that left her paralysed. After 12 weeks recovering in a spinal unit in Salisbury, she was due to be discharged in January, but because of a lack of accessible homes for disabled people, she has become a “bedblocker”: well enough to leave hospital, but with nowhere suitable to go. The private rented two-storey terraced house she shared with her boyfriend, Ryan Waters, before the accident is unusable with her new wheelchair – “I can’t even get inside,” she says – and her council can’t find social housing that is accessible to her.The hospital has become Garner’s makeshift home. The nurses are kind, but she can only see friends and family during visiting hours; no one is allowed in past 8pm. “That’s not normal life,” she says. Meanwhile, since the couple have ended their rental agreement in the hope of getting an accessible property together, Waters is being housed by the council in Premier Inns, shipped from one to the next, from week to week. Garner has lived with him for four years and says not spending nights together is “horrible … You realise that all you are to the council, is a number, a statistic and your mental wellbeing means nothing to the people higher up.” Continue reading…
Via: 'I never feel safe': meet the people at the very sharpest end of the housing crisis – disabled millennials