Stigma against people who rent?

Our landlord lives in the next village and it takes months to get things fixed. 

I don't know about the rest of the U.S., but, when I lived with a room mate last year in San Diego, our landlord was really good, I thought. The water was included in our bill, as was the trash collection. There were notices posted on our door when the rent was increased(we didn't like it, of course, but, at least there was a good amount of time for us to do our own budgeting rearrangements), and when the smoke detectors needed changing, there was also a notice, to let us know that our apartments would be entered and the work would be done. When my roommate's sink was plugged up, she called the landlord, and he came round to fix it for her. He only lived about 30 min away from us, and we were in a building with 6 units. We even had a laundry room(washer/tumble dryer only, but still)!

Now that I've seen other posts on this thread, I'm not looking forward to the time when DH and I do have to rent, now. I know it'll give us independence and privacy, but, at what cost? I know plenty of people have had positive experiences, but, our town's not really a place where I can see good, positive private landlords being the norm, but, the anomaly. Oh dearie me!!! Eek!

I think that in both the US and the UK, a lot will just depend on the landlord. There are good and bad landlords everywhere. The difference has to do with how the laws protect you if you end up with a bad landlord.

Another issue that we have here in York is student housing, which reduces the amount of rental housing available for families.  Landlords rent homes out to students at exhorbitant prices. They will take a three bedroom house and rent it out to four students (they convert the living room to another bedroom), then charge each student a weekly rent so that the total rent they get for the month is much more than they would get if they were renting to a family.

Also, students are less likely to complain if anything is wrong with the house because they usually spend less time at home and  they often don't know any better.

When DH and I were looking for a house to rent, there were a lot of places where we weren't even considered because the landlords only wanted to rent to students. They had no interest in renting to a quiet, settled middle aged couple.

When DH and I were looking for a house to rent, there were a lot of places where we weren't even considered because the landlords only wanted to rent to students. They had no interest in renting to a quiet, settled middle aged couple.

I think this ends up being an issue in most college towns.  Here in Madison, it's not so much that they actively refuse to rent to non-students.  It's just that the all the leases run from mid-August, making it extremely difficult to find available apartments at any other time of year.  In addition, the properties themselves tend to come in 3 varieties: tiny, run-down and reasonably priced; run-down and slightly overpriced; or shiny-new, luxurious, and stratospherically overpriced.  So, non-students are effectively shut out of housing in the center of town, and relegated to cookie-cutter, suburban yuppie-kennels.

Same in Cambridge, only even the run down places tend to be overpriced.