I remember the beginning of the end of my seven-year career as a housing officer. It was the day I was issued with a steel mitten, after one of my colleagues pricked her finger on a used needle taped to the underside of a stairwell bannister in a high-rise tower block.



I knew my work could make me a target for anger and abuse. I understood why disturbed residents took out their frustration on authority figures. But a deliberate and thoughtless act that could indiscriminately harm anyone was beyond my comprehension. It was a wake-up call: I knew I was out of my league and couldn’t last much longer.

I’d been out of university for a couple of years when I started working in housing management. I had trained in hotel management and worked for a hospital accommodation office, which got me in the door with a local council looking for someone to assist tenants with issues, ensure rent accounts stayed in the black, and manage the day-to-day affairs of an estate. Over the next seven years, I managed rural and inner-city housing estates in London, Birmingham, Coventry and Worcestershire.

Being able to make a positive difference to just one person or family kept me in my career for so long



It turned out that assisting tenants with issues included everything from neighbour disputes to outright racism, chronic hoarding to arson, and domestic violence to disenfranchised young people. I rotated through being a social worker, lawyer, police officer, debt counsellor and therapist. I interviewed suspected murderers, pimps and gang members, and had weekly meetings with social services, probation, schools and police.

My work was tough, and when I could rise above the frustrations, I felt enlivened by it. Being able to make a positive difference to just one person or family kept me in my career for so long. But disillusionment set in when I began seeing the same problems present themselves wherever I worked and most days came with a solid gut-check about my choice of career.

There was the time I entered a crack house with children present, or the time I turfed out a prostitute and her client from the bin room of a tower block, or the heroin addict I found who had overdosed in a car park and somehow kept alive until the ambulance arrived. And there was the man I came across dead in his flat, who had been in front of a gas fire for weeks.



I was exposed to situations that frontline law enforcement and paramedics would confront, but without any training or trauma counselling. As the years stacked up, so did the toll on my mental health.



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I was responsible for ensuring hundreds of thousands of pounds of rent revenue came in each week from housing benefit claims. I tried to postpone court applications for rent arrears whenever I felt tenants were trying to address the situation. Seeking a money judgment or a possession order from the courts can be a lengthy, costly process. Of the hundreds of court cases I presented for rent arrears, most were adjourned or resulted in orders to pay back thousands of pounds at a couple of pounds a week.

When I did get an eviction order and showed up with a court bailiff and a locksmith, the residents had usually left. But I recall one family having their breakfast as the lock on the front door was being drilled out. They told me they didn’t think I would actually go through with it, and paid off all the arrears on the spot.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I enjoyed handing out keys to new tenants. If they kept to their tenancy conditions and had no issues to report, I wouldn’t hear from them. Housing officers have no control over the allocation of housing, which is the purview of allocations officers. If there was an oversight, however, I dealt with the consequences.







Every day I dealt with social issues — substance abuse, homelessness, unemployment, social isolation, domestic violence, crime and troubled young people — all directly or indirectly tied to mental health issues.

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I have always believed it should be a priority of social housing to address residents’ mental health issues. The social housing system has its flaws, but providers do their best with limited resources. And if there is a panacea for the chronic boredom of disenfranchised young people on a housing estate, it may be found in some of the amazing youth outreach initiatives and renewal programmes I have worked alongside. But these were too often the exception rather than the rule.



I tip my hat to housing officers still out in the field. By the time I was in my early 30s, I was done, and switched to a career in corporate communications to salvage my own mental health.