Housing Crisis - 5 in a two bed flat

[Westcountrygal]

I was flabbergasted to recently learn about so many people sharing incredibly cramped living conditions. A Scottish MP saying on the radio that he grew up sharing with his two brothers, effectively three kids to a bedroom.

A colleague living in a two bed flat with her three kids, older ones sharing and baby in with the parents- where will they all go as the kids get older?

I live in an incredibly expensive city and coming across so many people living in very cramped living conditions must be so difficult. Where do people even keep all their clothes/ endless washing/ belongings?

Where is there a situation where there isn’t this option?

I had to share a room with a baby when I was a teenager, then eventually we swapped when I had my gcse's and I got the box room but had no storage for anything. It made me determined to ensure I could provide my own children with their own space. I personally feel it's selfish of parents to keep having children when they don't have space for them.

i grew up with 4 in a 2 bed flat. Well, it was a council house that was 4 homes in one block. It was normal where I lived. We just got on with it. What else can you do?

People are often choosing to have more children than they have adequate space for. That's their decision.

I appreciate some people fall on hard times or for some their circumstances change, but there are parents who choose to keep having children without room to house them properly.

That's not the state's fault. That is the fault of the idiot parents.

Well, yes. The expenses associated with moving - boxes, hiring vans, storage if their new place wasn’t ready…
Then there’s the practicality of it; they’re just scraping by on their current wages and so any rental property needs to be bigger than 3 bed, but with the same price or preferably slight less. They have an ok landlady currently who hasn’t increased their rent since 2019 (when the shit hit the fan for them!) so it’s reasonably cheap for a 3 bed: they can’t afford any more.
Then there’s stuff like general painting and maintenance that would need doing before they moved - general maintenance things are their responsibility as per their tenancy (stuff like painting the walls, fixing a new tap and sorting the floor where the dog chewed it as a puppy). These are things my friend manages with because she cannot afford them right now and her rent is cheap. To move into a rental property nearby (all 4 children attend local schools, 3 walk and one is taken by me with my son) she would be looking at minimum doubling her rent.

But all of that stuff still needs doing when you own except you also have an extra £20k in tax and fees to pay. I’m not saying it’s not expensive I’m just saying I don’t think it costs anywhere near as much for renters to move than owners.

Our kids (boys ages 8 & 10) both have double beds in their own rooms, but choose to sleep together every night. They like the company and I love hearing them chat when they’re falling asleep. They’re happier still when they get to “camp” (sleeping bags and single camping mattresses) on the floor of my/DH’s bedroom 😂 I don’t get it, but they love being close.

It’s nice to have space, but we’re social creatures and living in close quarters was probably the norm.

I had a colleague who chose to have three kids in a two-bed tower block flat in London. He knew he couldn’t sell it easily because of the cladding issue. That situation I have much less sympathy with than someone making the best of a situation with a small home after leaving DV etc.

lots of my neighbours have 2 kids in a 2 bed flat, it's a nice middle class sort of area but 3 bedroom flats are rare and houses are £450k+ so out of a lot of people's price range and you need to move quite a way before you find something more affordable.

I’m not saying it costs the same - just that the expenses associated with moving are too much for my bestie right now.

It depends, I know family in 2 bedroom flat with 4 kids- parents sleep on the sofa in the living room, 2 boys and 2 girls share bedrooms. However, they have zero clutter, and are very organised. You wouldn't believe 6 people live there.

I tbink my feelings towards the situation would depend on what the parent/parents were doing to help ameliorate things for themselves and their children.

People just had less stuff in the olden days. I look back and think of my children’s bedrooms compared to what my sister and I had in our shared bedroom.
You had a doll each that was it, one doll for one child
Mine had the entire collection of Disney princesses so what’s that 15 of them? Plus clothes plus carriage plus Sylvanian families plus littlest pet shop plus baby born it was actual madness

Agreed. My 2 DC had separate bedrooms, and so did my brother and I, and we are all still close as adults. You don't have to share a bedroom to be close to a sibling. Indeed, as you say, there is more likely to be resentment and fights as they have no personal space.

My MIL brought up 4 children in a small, 2-bed council house.

They had two boys when they moved in, a 1YO and a baby, and she had a daughter when boy 2 was around 6. The daughter slept in her parents' bedroom until she was 2-3, when MIL had a 4th, another girl.

They moved the boys into the bigger bedroom and FIL put a partition wall down the middle of it to divide it into two, so sons and daughter were separated, although the boys had to walk through the girl's room to get to theirs. Then DD2 was moved into the room with her sister. They all slept in bunk beds until they left home.

The council would happily have rehoused them into a bigger place, but MIL loved the area, had created a beautiful garden that she would have hated to leave, and had loads of friends locally and didn't want to move. DP and his brother didn't have their own bedrooms until they left home.

MIL now lives alone in the same house, the partition has been removed and she has the big bedroom all to her self.

I mean the overall theme to this is people having large amounts of kids. Obviously someone with 5 or 7 kids will struggle to give them all rooms.
I have one DC, probably won't have another because id really need a 4 or 5 bed house then.

Growing up there was me, my parents, one brother and two sisters all living in a one bedroom flat.

I genuinely don't get the whole panic about kids sharing rooms!
At one point, we lived in a small 3 bed house, with mum, dad, my sister, brother, me, and an extended family member (for about a year.)
Normally we were bed 1 - mum & dad, bed 2 - sister & me, bed 3 - brother. But, when the family member came, they got my brother's room, which meant sister and I were in a double bed, and brother in a cabin/bunk bed, in the same room. We were aged about 7 - 11 at the time. No-one batted an eyelid.
Whilst I wouldn't have done that by choice, our family member would otherwise have been homeless, so that's how it was. Probably couldn't have gone on longer than it did, because my sister was getting older, etc. We went back to us two girls sharing, until we moved to a slightly bigger place when I was about 12 (I am the middle child.)

The whole 'a bedroom for each child, and one spare' is a much more modern, middle-class, approach, I think. People we knew who had that seemed much better off than we were. I think we were completely average (one parent was a nurse, the other a teacher.)

Oh, and as far as I understand it, the Council don't consider you overcrowded unless you've got kids of opposite gender sharing, past the age of 7. I'm not sure how many of each you can have in a room.... I guess if you had 10 kids, in a 3 bed Council property, they'd be looking to re-house you.
My Mum was one of 7 kids. She and her sister came off best, as they got a room between 2, when the boys had one between 5!!

@TheEllisGreyMethod
why on earth would you need a 4 or 5 bedroom house with 2 children? That’s just bonkers!

I don’t think 2 children sharing a bedroom is a big issue at all. I’ve got a 3 bed house, we would originally have had enough space for all of us to have enough room but then I unexpectedly feel pregnant with twins so our DC will have to share for the foreseeable until we can do an extension. It’s not the end of the world! We just have less things than other people so that we have space for it, and I much prefer that

There were 5 of us in a 3 bed when I was a child/teen (2 double bedrooms, and 1 box room). I think that’s fairly standard. However, by the age of 15ish I had got so sick of sharing with my sister and fighting over space, and my parents were so aggravated by the constant bickering, that I was moved into the dining room (5 of us trying to eat our dinner all hunched around a 2-person bistro table in the kitchen was quite a sight to behold).

My friend and her husband have 2 daughters in a 1 bedroom flat. The kids have the bedroom and friend and her husband have a sofabed in the kitchen/living area. They also have another baby on the way… But they’ve chosen to stay put because the rent is obviously much lower than a 2/3 bed. They could afford to move which is what baffles me.
I completely understand that circumstances change, and sadly sometimes people have no choice but to live in an overcrowded property; but I do scratch my head at those who already live in a cramped property and think it’s a good idea to make their family even bigger, I would feel like I’m purposely depriving my children of their own space and privacy?

Brought up in a 2 bed, mo bathroom, outside toilet. We then became 5 so moved to a larger 2 bed, outside toilet, split bedrooms to make 3 and 1 bathroom. Certainly never felt deprived. When I got married moved to a 2 bed with no central heating, was freezing!
Had a happy childhood, good food, proper parenting and playing out ... hopscotch and elastics.

Now live (2 of us) in a 4 bed 3.5 bathroom house. Times have certainly changed ... larger house diesnt necessarily make you happier.

Friends of mine ended up in this situation. They were planning on moving after their second was born and then the financial crash in 2007 prevented them from moving. They then had an unplanned pregnancy so had 3 in a tiny 2 bedroom flat. They finally managed to move a number of years later to a 3 bedroom house which offered scope to extend into the attic.

master bedroom, 2 kids bedrooms, guest room, and home office?