A monthly payslip feels like a golden ticket when you’re used to struggling to pass the referencing process for a rental agreement. If you can find a job that will give one to you consistently, you have a token that will grant you access to housing and credit. Earning that exact same amount of money in the underground economy will get you substantially less far.
Although the Renters’ Rights Act takes steps in the right direction, sex workers continue to face additional barriers to housing because it is harder for us to prove an income. Trying to demonstrate that we can afford to live somewhere whilst also hiding the source of our money is an infuriating task.
Let’s say you’re a full-service sex worker in London. You’re hooking from a mixture of hotel rooms you purchase, your own home (when your housemates are out), and occasional outcalls to clients’ homes. If you lived alone, you could make far more money by working solely from home as often as you wanted, and the higher rent would be offset by no longer needing to pay for hotels or travel. The problem is, to live alone you’d have to pass the referencing process for a rent that high. You barely managed to secure the place you live now, with two housemates you barely know.
The landlord has decided to kick you out before the new Renters Rights bill comes into effect, so he can sell the place and live off of his profits during his retirement. You feel dread in the pit of your stomach the moment that you hear you have two months to vacate. It was only six months ago that you got your room in this house share and you have no savings for paying your next deposit before you get the last one back. It’s a good thing you own so little that it can all fit into a taxi, saving you the cost of a moving van or disposal.
There’s no point in calling estate agents to see what properties they have available, or in using the most popular websites where estate agents advertise. You scroll Rightmove purely to get a sense of average pricing in your area, dismayed. Wherever you move to will be worse than these homes and you’ll pay extra for the privilege of not being screened. You consider locations based on how densely populated you think the area is with clients, as well as how far it is from services you trust for STI tests and sex worker resources.
The first time you moved after starting sex work, you were naïve to how the referencing process would exclude you. It was your first year selling sex so you didn’t have self-employment tax returns, only logs of the cash paid into your bank account in varying amounts each week. It didn’t matter that you gave them full access to your bank, statements far beyond the three payslips they would otherwise have demanded, because you couldn’t reassure them that the money would keep coming in. Your story about cash-in-hand payments for modelling sounded false even to your own ears. The only landlord willing to skip referencing who had a bedroom available on short notice wanted three months rent upfront. You spent every penny you had and slept on the floor for the first week in your unfurnished box room.
Referencing hasn’t gotten any easier in the years since that first attempt. Although you can now provide self-employed tax returns, your earnings each month are still highly variable. One estate agent tells you their policy is to assume you will make only as much as your lowest-earning month within the last six. You worked extra hard to save so that you could take a break for several weeks, which now leaves your lowest-earning month at only a few hundred pounds. Another estate agent tells you that they will base their assessment not on your current earnings, but those declared for last year’s tax returns… when you were working a separate part-time job and your self-employed hooking income was low.
You’re expected to earn at least 2.5 times more than the rent, to pass the referencing. For a house share in one of the cheaper areas that you cannot work from, you’d have to pay £650 per month, which means proving an income of £1,625. You can make that every month, but you haven’t earned it every month for the last few years so it doesn’t matter what you can do. It doesn’t matter that you’ve been paying £700 per month in rent at your current place without ever missing a payment.
You search for private landlords who won’t expect you to undergo checks. One offers you the “deal” of paying 6 months rent upfront with the option to pay monthly from then onwards. Another tells you he needs double the deposit, in case you stop paying. The next offers to let you forego any deposit, but tells you he might need to crash on the sofa a few nights a month (don’t worry, the other tenants are okay with it). Eventually you find a place that only wants a deposit and first month’s rent, but won’t give you a written contract. It costs £950 a month for the room. You take it.
Travel costs more, you can no longer see any clients from home, and you need to see more clients to afford the higher rent. You’ve never seen more clients and you’ve also never struggled more to afford food. You start to put a few necessary purchases on your credit card, to make sure you can make rent each month. Two clients cancel on a night when you’ve already paid for the hotel, and that setback is enough that you can’t get out of the debt spiral.
Eight months later, the landlord divorces his wife and decides he’ll be moving back into the house. Your room is the largest, so it’s the one he wants for his stint as a live-in landlord. You have one month to leave. None of this is legal, but fighting it would carry the risk you’ll be outed as a sex worker.
The higher rent has wiped out your savings. Your last landlord is arguing with you about getting the deposit back. Everywhere wants to know what your job is, how you earn money, and they all expect a consistency that sex work cannot provide you. You lose the bed you purchased because you can’t afford to move or store it. Everything you own fits into a suitcase that you bring with you to your friend’s house, where you sleep on the sofa for a couple of weeks while you frantically look for a place.
Someone on Instagram is passing on their room, secretly subletting. A story about it is forwarded to you. They’re charging £700. You take it without seeing the room in person. A few months later, as the Renters’ Rights Act will soon come into effect, that landlord issues a section 21. You aren’t even the legal tenant, so you need to vacate as soon as possible.
At a time when reforms are being made to how we rent and how much power landlords have, sex workers are being left behind.
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