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My name’s Lucy Maddox. I’m 21 years old with a first-class Design degree and I’m homeless. That doesn’t mean I’m sleeping rough – more about that in a minute – but I lost my home a year ago and now my mum, my 13-year-old sister and I are stuck in limbo. In June last year, our landlord decided to sell off the place in Essex we’d been renting for the past decade, the home where I’d grown up with my sister. My mum has always taken jobs that would fit around raising the pair of us, so she’s never had a high salary, and when it came to finding another place for us to live, there was nothing we could afford. You’ve seen the newspapers. Rents and house prices are rocketing (especially in the south-east) and we just couldn’t keep pace. My mum was never on benefits. We’re not the ‘scroungers’ those same newspapers say are dragging the country down. We were just priced out. Within a month, we were dropping off cardboard boxes full of our stuff to friends and family, realising that we couldn’t afford a place for the three of us to stay together. SMART, TALENTED AND HOMELESS While I might not be sleeping on the street, I’m still without a home. Getting a job is tough, for me and for my mum, and I’ve got a stack of student debt that I might never manage to pay off. My sister is in school and she’s not doing so well. My mum is broken and it takes all my energy to smile and tell her that everything will be okay. Maybe I’m lying to her. But there’s over a million people hoping that I – and you – can find us all a way out of here. It was supposed to be a stopgap, but a year later, we’re still here. My mum has been on the waiting list for a council house for the past 12 years, and there’s no prospect of us getting one. It’s no surprise. There are 1.8 million people waiting for social housing in England alone and there’s nowhere near enough to go round. One in ten people experience homelessness at some point in their lives here, and it’s all too easy to get trapped in the system. 80,000 children in the UK were homeless last Christmas. You can email Lucy on [email protected] She promises to reply to every message. You can also call or text her on +44 1641 212031
