Cambridge’s housing crisis stretches across the income scale. The Conservative candidate here says he can’t afford to live in the city; the Green party candidate is worried about the cost of his rented flat; the new editor of the Cambridge News lives outside the centre, where prices are less insane.

In the past fortnight I’ve heard from a teacher who quit her job and moved 150 miles away to Shropshire because she couldn’t afford the rent, an NHS auditor who often spends two hours getting into work in the morning because her salary doesn’t allow her to live anywhere near the city’s hospital, a care worker living with her parents in Suffolk (at 30) and doing a long daily commute to do vital work with adolescents with eating disorders, and a university administrator unhappily stuck in cramped houseshares.

Meanwhile, rough sleeping has doubled over the past year. The city centre is dotted with bodies zipped into sleeping bags, asleep in doorways, an issue highlighted in an unexpected way in February when a Cambridge student in bow tie and tails chose to burn a £20 note in front of a homeless person. There are no properties available for rent within the city that fall within the capped local housing allowance, which determines the maximum housing benefit available: that means that people reliant on housing benefit either have to look elsewhere or divert money meant for food towards paying the rent.

Since the financial crisis, house prices have increased here more than anywhere else but London – but the city’s university, science parks and biomedical centre all rely on poorly paid workers to keep going. And so it’s not surprising that everyone wants to talk about housing. In our callout to readers for this project, trying to understand the issues at the heart of this hyper-marginal constituency, people raised the subject as frequently as they mentioned Brexit. As I write, emails keep coming in, from people like David Budd, who works as project manager for the Cambridge Assessment exam board and is angry to find himself “in my mid-30s and earning above the average Cambridge salary (just) but stuck living in an overcrowded houseshare because single occupancy rents are so astronomical and actually buying a house is totally beyond my means”.



The politicians who are campaigning increasingly fiercely for this seat all recognise that this is a key issue in a constituency struggling to keep up with its own success. Less clear is how the city’s property problem will help rival candidates to pull forward, and whether, despite a universal obsession with housing, this issue actually drives how people vote. Unpicking which party can take credit for new (so-called) affordable schemes, and which party should be held responsible for historical housing failures is a head-spinning task, with each candidate claiming triumphs and apportioning blame in equal measure.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bukola Obameso photographed in her daughter’s bedroom.

There is a huge shortage of supply, and yet around the edges of the city there is a phenomenal amount of building under way. Drive out to the south and you will be confronted by signs offering expensive flats in the massive new community of Great Kneighton, where 2,500 homes are going up, grouped into different areas with peculiar names: Paragon, Aura, Halo, Virido. The cheapest flat in the Abode development costs £420,000, and the most expensive is a five-bedroom house, on at £1,295,000. About 40% is on sale with affordable housing programmes, but even these help-to-buy schemes don’t bring the upfront cost down below about £330,000. The agent opening up the showhome apartment says mostly the buyers are young professionals, junior doctors or people who own their own businesses.

As Nigel Howlett, the chief executive of CHS Group housing association, which operates elsewhere in Cambridge, puts it: “The proportion of affordable housing has been kept up, but the affordability of the affordable housing has decreased.”

Emma Smith, 22, working two jobs as an archaeology research assistant and as a schools liaison officer for Homerton College, pays £480 a month for a room in a new flat at the finished end of a half-built street in Great Kneighton. The site is advertised as “a new community for Cambridge”, but there aren’t any shops yet, and the area feels deserted apart from a few people in neon hi-vis jackets monitoring the construction site. People who come over say “it’s like an apocalyptic movie, it’s so quiet,” Smith says.



But she has a lot of friends who have left Cambridge because of housing costs, some of whom have settled in Leeds and Manchester because it’s cheaper, and she is happy to have found an affordable room. She remains torn between voting for Labour or the Liberal Democrats, and her vote is actually unlikely to have anything to do with housing. “My focus is not what will happen to the roads, or what will happen to the housing – I’ll vote to keep the Conservatives out.” She likes the Lib Dems’ position on Brexit but is angry that they voted with the coalition in favour of welfare reform. “I’ll probably vote Labour,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A new housing development in south Cambridge near Addenbrooke’s hospital.

Nearby in the busy, windowless canteen area of Addenbrooke’s hospital, an NHS administrator in her mid-40s (who asks not to be named) on a salary of about £15,000, married to another NHS employee on a salary of about £12,000, says she wouldn’t be able to afford to take advantage of a shared ownership scheme in the city. “It is beyond us even on our joint salary,” she says. Instead, she and her husband commute 12 miles every morning by bus on narrow roads, and on bad days it can take two hours. She is angry at cuts to the NHS and says she “can’t see what the Conservatives have done for my generation”, but she describes herself as “not working class enough to vote Labour”. Housing won’t be the issue swaying her vote; she thinks she will vote Lib Dem – not least because she knew Tim Farron at university.

Housing is a massive preoccupation for Bukola Obameso, who has lived in Cambridge since 2001 and worked as a part-time, zero-hours contract care worker, earning £8 an hour with an agency, since 2009; this year she has struggled with housing arrears because her wages fluctuate. She has paid off her debts, but making ends meet remains a challenge, so she is working as many hours as she can. For the past fortnight she has been working six nights a week, and studying in college during the day towards a social work qualification, squeezing in time to get her daughter to and from school in between.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shem Davidson, a homeless builder, at Jimmy’s in Cambridge.

She is one of the luckier Cambridge workers, with a housing association tenancy, which means she pays under the market rate for her two-bedroom flat (about £500 a month). If she lost the tenancy she would have to rent in the private sector and the weekly rent would be dramatically higher.

“The cost of living is very high,” she says. “I’m always in the red, no matter what I do. But if you don’t pay, you will lose the property because housing is so in demand. They will kick you out and put someone with more job security in the house.” And yet she, too, says that her vote is not swayed by housing considerations. “I will vote Labour again this time. Being a foreigner, I think Labour is better for us,” she says.

All the candidates say housing is a priority, and promise to fix things, with pledges so confidently articulated that you wonder why the situation is such a mess now. Labour’s Daniel Zeichner says the party is responsible for securing a planned 500 new council homes in the recent devolution deal, and promises to work cross-party to improve conditions for renters. The Liberal Democrats’ Julian Huppert says the Lib Dems were responsible for building more council houses when he was MP between 2010 and 2015, and promises to campaign for more “truly affordable housing”. John Hayward for the Conservatives points to the Conservative manifesto commitment “to deliver a million homes by the end of 2020 and half a million more by the end of 2022”, and says he wants a “new generation of social housing”.

At Cambridge’s Citizens Advice, staff say they see people who, as the advice session supervisor Christiane Barker puts it, are renting “pretty dire properties. We know people are renting garden sheds.” It is depressing, Barker says, to be telling people to look for homes further and further from town, up to 20 miles away. “Then you have substantial costs of getting into work every day; if you’re working antisocial hours you can’t take the bus.”

At the bottom of the housing ladder is Shem Davidson, 29, a builder (“building houses, ironically”, he says), who has been sleeping rough on and off for a decade, sometimes behind a bush in a graveyard (where he feels relatively secure), sometimes on friends’ sofas. About 30% of the rough sleepers staying at the charity Jimmy’s are in work.

Davidson says he thinks his battle to find secure housing has less to do with property prices and more to do with the lack of services to help people like him with depression and mental health problems. He has been helped to register to vote, but neither housing nor NHS services are his main concern; he thinks he will vote Green or Labour.

Almost across the board, the disconnect between voting intention and the deep concern that most people show about housing is striking. But whoever wins next week, the issue is only likely to become even more pressing here in the years ahead. The mean annual Cambridge salary is £30,000; in order to buy the average house you need to borrow 16.7 times the average salary, and no mortgage lender will offer that. According to Mary Gibbons, the chief executive of the housing association Hundred Houses Society, the constituency needs 23,000 new homes just to keep pace with demand, let alone deal with the backlog. “The affordability issue,” she says, “is at breaking point.”