For Erika Allen, living in a defunct London police station has its trade-offs.
Pros include cheap rent, a large bedroom and the old holding cells, which make excellent bike storage. Among the cons are the lack of a dedicated living room, monthly room inspections and the possibility of being removed at a moment’s notice.
“But if you’ve got a chilled-out mind-set and you’re always ready to move,” she said, “you can save a lot of money.”
That is the primary sales pitch for property guardianship, as Ms. Allen’s living arrangement is known. The concept, in which people pay licensing fees to live in otherwise vacant buildings for significantly less than market rent rates, has become more popular in London in recent years as housing costs in the city have soared.
Proponents say guardianships could be a solution for the housing crisis in London, as well as in other housing-starved cities.
“There are millions of square feet of commercial properties which are sitting empty and vacant,” said Graham Sievers, the chair of the Property Guardian Providers Association, a trade association. “These are places which could be readily and easily converted into safe, habitable, affordable accommodations.”
The guardianship model is straightforward. Residents, known as guardians, live in shuttered offices, closed schools, empty churches and out-of-business pubs for relatively cheap fees. Building owners get some income and de facto security, as simply having people living in empty buildings is typically enough to ward off issues like vandalism, break-ins and squatters.
Property guardian companies act as the brokers and property managers, connecting residents and owners and maintaining the spaces. They also rehabilitate the buildings to make them habitable, and must meet certain standards established by the government, like minimum room sizes, adequate showers and bathrooms per inhabitant, and proper ventilation and fire alarm systems.
Guardian companies often share renovation costs with the owner, then typically make money by taking a portion of the guardians’ fee.
It differs from renting in a few other major ways: Guardianship agreements are temporary, and residents are typically given a month’s notice to move out if their building is pulled out of guardianship. Guardians also don’t have exclusive rights to the property, and most guardian companies conduct semiregular property checks. The sector itself is also largely unregulated, meaning residents have little recourse compared to typical renters when they have issues with owners or guardian companies.
But for guardians like Ms. Allen, a 30-year-old tattoo artist, the setup makes it possible to live frugally in a desirable neighborhood.
She paid around 710 pounds, or about $960, a month for a bedroom in the police station, which she shared with around 10 others. The building is in Richmond-upon-Thames, one of the city’s poshest boroughs where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is around £1,700 (roughly $2,300), according to the Office for National Statistics.
“You get to live with some cool people in very quirky places,” Ms. Allen said. She even set up her own tattoo parlor on the ground floor of the police station before moving last year to another property, a former adult learning center in the trendy borough of Camden.
“It just makes life interesting,” she said.
It makes life cheaper, too, a crucial benefit in London, where the average monthly rent is around £2,200 (about $2,950) and the median annual income is around £47,000, or about $63,200, before taxes.
The city has tried to address its housing shortage, unveiling a plan in 2021 to build around 52,000 new homes per year, but the number of completed units has not kept pace. Many Londoners have adjusted to ballooning rents by making sacrifices like trading their living room for an extra bedroom or taking on roommates for years.
Liam McGovren, a 30-year-old bartender, has lived in eight locations as a guardian since 2021, including in an office, a pub and as the sole occupant of a boutique hotel. He was recently paying around £700 a month (about $950) for the entire floor of a townhouse in central London, a short walk from Buckingham Palace.
“I wouldn’t be able to afford this,” he said recently, speaking underneath a sleek chandelier in his ample entryway.
“People come over and say, ‘Wow, your room’s like three times the size of mine, and you’re living in central London,’” he said. “I think the positives outweigh the negatives.”
In the past, guardianship was seen as an edgy lifestyle choice for transient young people, or creative types. The concept began in the Netherlands in the 1990s as an anti-squatter measure, and spread to Britain in the early 2000s. But as the cost of living in London has skyrocketed, guardianship has attracted older and more established residents, property guardian companies said. The service is particularly popular, they said, among gig workers, people relocating for jobs and those going through a divorce or breakup.
At a recent open house at a tidy, repurposed retirement home in Surbiton, a neighborhood along the River Thames in southwest London, a constant churn of potential guardians of all ages came to see a few available units.
Single rooms with a shared bathroom were on offer for around £800 per month (roughly $1,000), a bargain in a neighborhood where one-bedroom apartments average around £1,400 (roughly $1,860).
Among the prospective roommates was Tim Davis, a construction executive in his early 40s who had recently separated from his wife. He said he was looking for a budget-friendly place to stay when he worked from his office in the city, with plans to spend the weekends with his daughter in Surrey, a county just southwest of London.
“It suits my lifestyle,” said Mr. Davis, who noted he’d save around £400 (nearly $550) per month by choosing guardianship over sharing a flat with roommates in the neighborhood. “Having a young daughter, all the money that you can save toward her future just helps really.”
After touring the property for a few minutes, he was eager to put in an application.
“It’s really high demand,” he said. “These guardian places, they go very, very quickly.”
As it has become more popular, guardianship has drawn some scrutiny from the authorities in Britain. In 2022, the national housing ministry published a report that found that “most property guardians reported very poor conditions” in properties and admitted that “very little is known” about the sector.
Local governments are largely responsible for regulating guardian properties. In a statement, the ministry said that it had given local authorities the ability to penalize property owners if standards are not met, including preventing buildings from being occupied.
Arthur Duke, the owner of Live-in Guardians, one of about a dozen property guardianship companies that operate in London, said there were “cowboys” in the marketplace, or companies that don’t act in good faith and exploit guardians. He said he has worked hard to raise industry standards and has been troubled a few times during initial inspections of buildings his company has taken over from other guardian companies.
“We’d been horrified, what we’ve seen,” he said. “They’re death traps, basically.”
Mr. Sievers, of the trade association, agreed that conditions could be hit or miss, and said his organization was working to establish a set of standards among guardian companies.
“It’s not a regulated sector, which can lead to people cutting corners,” he said. “That’s why we would like to see the government cooperate with us and help set up an agency that makes regulations more enforceable.”
Interviews with current and former guardians suggest that guardianship can at times feel like a secret life hack or a complete slog — and sometimes both in the same day.
Ruth Chambers, a 42-year-old artist who has lived in three guardianship properties since 2022, said some places felt like home with a solid community, while others could feel unsafe because of poor outdoor lighting, antisocial behavior from roommates or theft issues.
“I think it was only after I left that I realized that I was quite stressed in the day-to-day,” said Ms. Chambers, who recently moved out of guardianship and into a shared apartment.
Still, she said, guardianship provided an invaluable bridge after a sudden breakup, and she found it difficult to secure a traditional lease.
“It rescued me at that time,” she said.
Jonathan Wolfe is a Times reporter based in London, covering breaking news.
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