I’m a 65-year-old man living in a house-share near Salford, Manchester. I’ve been here for four years, maybe five – who’s counting? – and I share with four others. More and more over-60s are finding themselves in situations like mine. According to one flat-sharing site, there’s been a 239% increase in 55- to 64-year-olds looking for house-shares since 2011. My housemates are all single men, like me, in their 40s and 50s. I’m the oldest of the group, but age doesn’t make much difference here, we all keep ourselves to ourselves. I think one of the housemates works in construction, another works at the Tesco down the road with me. I wouldn’t say there’s much sense of community here. Working shifts in low-wage jobs means we’re rarely all in the house together. I might go downstairs to cook and eat, but the rest of the time, I stay in my room – a standard double in a converted council house. There is a TV downstairs, but I prefer to watch programmes over the wifi on my phone. There are often empty rooms, and often tenants leave at short notice, especially eastern European tenants. A lot of them now seem to be leaving. Who can blame them? Between the stagnating wages and the soaring cost of living, there’s little incentive to stay. Overall, I can’t complain. I pay £100 a week to live here, including bills. It would be nice to have my own space, but the bills make it completely unaffordable – council tax, electricity, water, wifi. Who could afford that on a supermarket salary? I’m lucky to have a decent landlord who has never increased my rent. He pops in every other day, claiming to do bits of maintenance around the house. In reality, he sits in the kitchen on his laptop. Some might find it intrusive that he’s here so often, but I don’t mind – he’s got lots of kids at home and I think he likes the quiet. In days gone by, I would have been offered a one-bedroom council flat. Fifteen years ago, I had my own council flat, but I moved on when I was unemployed and looking for work. Back then, you didn’t think twice about giving up a council tenancy because it was so easy to find a new one. Not like now. Where I grew up, in Wythenshawe, south Manchester, you couldn’t move for three-bedroom council houses with gardens. Some of those houses were taken over by the children of former tenants, but they’ve all been moved on now. You weren’t allowed to stay in a three-bedroom flat as a single person. The irony is that those council properties have since been steadily sold off for pennies and no one’s building three-bedroom homes any more. You would have to be blind not to see that this is a direct result of the slow, deliberate erosion of the welfare state. If you’re a single person who has never been able to afford to buy your own home, then perhaps you’ll end up here, too. What is the alternative? It might not sound like the Ritz, but my living situation works for me. I prefer staying here to living with family, I have more privacy and my own space. We have a cleaner who comes in once a week. I won’t have to make the choice this winter between doing my shopping or putting the heating on. We have central heating and radiators in every room. In Manchester the houses are always damp all winter, so they have to be heated. I don’t know how my colleagues with children and three-bedroom houses will cope with the bills. Luxury apartments are going up all the time in Manchester, starting at £250,000. Average wages around here are £20,000 – you do the maths. Housing insecurity is a trend that’s only got worse over the last 15 years. But I try not to dwell on it. Things could always be worse. Onwards and upwards, I say.