She said a few simple tips could help locals and university-goers coexist
Continuous pile-ups of rubbish have become a nightmare for residents living near the University of the West of England’s Frenchay campus(Image: Sejal Hampson)
A resident turned landlord in a community plagued by waste piling up outside student houses has spoken out about how the issue can be fixed.
Steph Dunn owned a home in Cheswick Village for five years, before deciding to leave the area having become increasingly fed up with the antisocial behaviour of students. Ms Dunn, who now lives abroad, said she had finally called it a day after battling parties and the constant build up of waste around Houses of Multiple Occupancy (HMOs) on either side of her home.
“We decided, you know, we’d just had enough,” she said. “We never knew from one year to the next what kind of people we were going to be getting, and we didn’t know if they would be noisy or not, if they would take care of their rubbish or not.”
“You’d come out your own front door and it’d be absolutely stinking.”
Cheswick Green residents recently spoke out to Bristol Live about their frustration with the ongoing issues in the area, particularly around the build up of waste, and what they said was a lack of long-term enforcement from South Gloucestershire Council.
More and more student housing has been approved in Bristol in recent years, leading to fears the city centre was becoming a ‘campus’.
Instead of selling up, Ms Dunn decided to turn her own home into an HMO, giving her a unique perspective on the issues.
While she was honest about the financial incentives behind the decision to become a landlord, she said her own experiences as a former resident left her determined to be an example to the other landlords in the area.
“I wanted to be a responsible landlord and I do believe I am,” she said.
“I am a very hands-on landlord, I have a WhatsApp group (with the tenants) (where) I leave extra information on how to get rid of rubbish.”
As a result, she said she very rarely had issues with the students living in her former home. She acknowledged that there was no simple fix to the issues residents experienced in areas with high densities of students, and that there would always be some bad landlords and some bad students.
However, she hoped her own good relationship with the students who lived in her former home, and the good results that followed, would be an inspiration for the landlords who still owned houses in the area a stone’s throw from University of the West of England’s Frenchay campus.
“I just have a very good relationship with (my tenants),” she said. “It’s a team effort, I always feel they are more likely to respond to that and be good with me when I say, ‘Come on, guys, you know you can do better,’ they’re more likely to respond to that than with a landlord that is either absent or actually isn’t a very nice landlord.
“That makes the students feel that they resent paying their rent, and then they resent being where they are, and then that can have a disproportionate effect on how they treat the property they live in.”