The powerlessness of Michaela Ali

A pregnant health worker has spent months living in hotels because a social housing provider didn’t repair her rat-infested flat

By Jack Dulhanty

Friday morning — yesterday morning, in fact. Michaela Ali stands by the doorway of her flat with her fist pressed against her lips. Two contractors are discussing what to do about the nest of dead rats in her bedroom ceiling. As the men talk, her eyes flick between them and start to glisten with tears. But she shuts them tightly and when they open the tears are gone. 

Michaela, who is 36, has lived in a basement flat on Union Street in the Northern Quarter since 2013. She has been waiting for the rat infestation to be fixed since this time last year, continuing to pay the £500 social rent and council tax throughout, despite having been moved into four separate hotels for months at time. She is also seven months pregnant. 

In the past year, Michaela has made numerous complaints to Riverside, her housing association, and has met a revolving cast of contractors, subcontractors, surveyors and housing officers in the hopes of making the place habitable for herself and her child. She works 20 hours a week as a nurse’s assistant at Manchester Royal Infirmary and currently lives in a one-bed hotel room on Rochdale Road. 

Michaela Ali. Photo: Jack Dulhanty/The Mill.

She is also — visibly, as we stand in the hallway outside her flat — at the end of her tether. Sometimes, when we speak, she’ll stop mid-sentence to swallow and look away. Other times she’ll stop herself so she can apologise for unloading on me. She also says, with the stress of her housing situation, she forgets she is pregnant. The experience of being so ignored by a "leading registered provider of social housing", as Riverside’s website boasts, has left her feeling completely unmoored. 

"When is this going to end?" she asked me over the phone earlier this week. "This situation I'm in, I feel like I'm just getting ignored. I just don't know whether it is ever going to end. I just get really upset. And, obviously, I just have to brace myself and go back out to work."

This is not a story that has been reported on in the media before, nor has it gone viral on social media. Michaela’s 71-year-old mother Margaret brought it to us in person, in the hope that media coverage might help her daughter. Margaret doesn’t read The Mill — she had just been told about us by a friend. And on Wednesday she spent an hour and a half lapping the Royal Exchange building looking for the entrance to our offices. 

Eventually, she found her way to the 5th floor and waited in the corridor until one of our team returned from lunch. Then she told her story. Michaela is about to give birth and has a high-risk pregnancy, she said. She’s living in hotels because her social flat has been uninhabitable for over a year. "She's just heartbroken.” 

The rats 

By her own admission, Michaela is not the kind of person who likes to complain. She likes to keep herself to herself, she often says. So, while she began reporting the sewage smell in her flat to Riverside not long after moving in, it was never something she made too much fuss about. 

She was told by Riverside employees that the smell was just because she had a basement flat and she needed to put some bleach down her drains. They also told her there wouldn’t be any chance of fixing or replacing the rickety spiral staircase that led to the basement because it would be too expensive. Essentially: the things she needed, she couldn’t have.

She had moved into the flat to get out of Gorton, where she had grown up, and to be closer to work, where she often works nights at the hospital. She’d go to work and come back home and that was it. “Because it was like a habit, I didn't really acknowledge it,” Michaela tells me. “I just thought: that’s life.”

Then last April the light fixture in her bedroom, on the basement level of the flat, began leaking. It was like a turned-on tap. The boiler, a tawny old tank that looks like part of a shipwreck, had broken. It was condemned and for two months, Michaela had no heating or hot water. Another leak continued from the bathroom and mould spread across the basement ceiling like bruises. “All of this just feels like repairs that weren’t done, finally all falling through at once,” she says.

Michaela’s mother, Margaret, in the Union Street flat. Photo: Jack Dulhanty/The Mill.

By August, a contractor was called to look in the ceiling to find the source of the leak. Once up there, he asked Michaela if she had a plastic bag. She got one and he dropped a partly-decapitated rat into it. Then he told her there were more rats, dead, beneath the boiler. Others had been trapped in the ceiling's wadding and were also dead. They had come from a neighbouring building site via an open drain.

There were pellets of rat droppings in the corner of her bedroom and wooden beams in the ceiling were rotten with urine. Riverside moved her out of the flat and into a hotel in September, while it was surveyed for vermin. 

The report advised the ceiling cavity be cleaned. Dated 7 September 2022, it reads “hygiene clean required in the ceiling... Rat urine and rat droppings carry various airborne pathogens and poses health risks to contractors working in the area.” Michaela says she only stayed in the hotel for about a week, and was moved back in without a hygiene clean being carried out. At the time of writing, it still hasn't been carried out. It might be carried out on Wednesday.

“We need to get this stuff out then drop the ceiling,” one of the contractors, a surveyor, said yesterday while Michaela watched. I was accompanying Michaela and Margaret, without saying I was a journalist, because I wanted to see for myself how she was being treated by Riverside. 

The other contractor agreed but said it would mean getting all of Michaela’s stuff out from the basement level first. That’d take some time. The contractors stepped out and started to talk to two pest controllers idling in the sunlight outside. “It’ll probably be a re-book for you,” one of the contractors said, and they all groaned affirmatively. 

The surveyor came back in and started speaking to Michaela in a conciliatory tone. This shouldn’t have happened. How long have you been waiting? Jesus. A year? This is a week’s work. At this point, Michaela looked at me like an actor breaking the fourth wall. 

He said he’ll put in a complaint. All the contractors are sympathetic, they take the chidings from Margaret — who repeats the stories of the dead rats and the leaks and the unsafe staircase, asking them how her daughter could ever be expected to carry a newborn down them — and agree none of it is right but they’re just here to do a job. 

There’s a feeling that the people who should be here answering these questions aren’t. Instead, contractors are just dropped in, hapless and without context, expected to field complaints that have little to do with them. 

Under the streets

When I sent questions to Riverside about Michaela’s experiences and the way their incompetence has upended her life, they didn’t bother to obfuscate or defend their record in this case. “We are sincerely sorry for the problems Ms Ali has experienced,” the housing association said. “Ms Ali is a customer who has experienced a very unfortunate set of circumstances and, while we have sought to deal with them proactively, it's clear we haven’t done so as effectively as we could have.” 

A spokesperson tells me that they did offer Michaela three alternative places to live near her workplace. The statement goes on: 

At the root of this is a pest control problem which emerged following the excavation work that took place at the neighbouring building site. This led to a catalogue of issues at her home including the terrible incident which affected her ceiling. Following that incident, we arranged for alternative hotel accommodation, which has continued for longer than we or Ms Ali would like. 

We have offered a range of temporary and permanent options for rehousing but are limited in that we do not own a great deal of stock in central Manchester and have not been able to find an option acceptable to Ms Ali. We have offered to support with finding other options, for example by supporting her to apply to the Manchester choice-based lettings scheme and advocating on her behalf to be made a priority for rehousing. That offer remains outstanding and we are continuing to work to repair Ms Ali’s home on Union Street.

I take the spiral staircase downstairs to Michaela’s bedroom. She no longer enters the flat on the advice of her housing officer, citing the health of her baby, who is due in November. The place is sparse because she never decorated it as it never felt like home. There’s a dream catcher nailed to the wall and a small hatch fitted into the ceiling by an exterminator so he could check for rats. I see the droppings in the corner.

The spiral staircase down to Michaela’s bedroom. Photo: Jack Dulhanty/The Mill.

The room smells like mould — dank and earthy. “It gets on your chest,” Margaret tells me. 

Since April, Michaela has been living in a hotel on Rochdale Road. It’s a double bed and a bathroom. She is given an allowance by Riverside to spend in the hotel but rarely does so out of embarrassment. It means she has been eating poorly, or not at all sometimes. It makes her worry about her baby.

“It’s degrading,” she says. The whole saga has been. It has sapped the sense of agency from her life, reduced it to a bed, a bathroom and an allowance, where articulating her concerns garners no response, or only a half-baked one. 

The word “powerless” gets used a lot, but speaking to Michaela, I get a deeper sense of what it really means. She is a social housing tenant, so she never presumed she had much power. But as she’s tried in vain to fix her dirty, rat-infested home, the situation has shown her she has none at all. It was only yesterday, when Riverside sent us their statement, that she got a proper apology — and that wasn’t even addressed to her. 

At the time she was first being moved around hotels because of the rat infestation, Michaela was still working 30 hour weeks at MRI, delivering care to patients, taking on the pressures of normal working life as well as the administrative nightmare of trying to get her housing situation, for which she is in no way to blame, in order. 

Even now, with construction work seemingly about to begin in earnest at long last, Michaela doesn’t trust that things will get done. She has heard it all before. And the experience has left a deeper impression: “You know when you just want it to go away? Because you just feel like it's there and it's just sticking in your mind? And then because you have had to repeat yourself, you feel hopeless.”

Over the summer, her hotel room became too hot. The windows don’t open. She started spending more of her time on Angel Meadows, a small park behind the Co-operative building. It helped her feel less isolated and gave her room to think. Michaela, Margaret and I leave the flat to go there.

Emerging into the Northern Quarter, where the bars and restaurants are laying tables out for the afternoon, we see through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the privately-rented flats in the area and watch their inhabitants walking Shiba Inus and Chihuahuas through the park. Social housing is supposed to allow people like Michaela to share the city centre with these better-paid residents, so that she can do her job and be part of Manchester’s society. But visiting her subterranean flat makes that notion feel hopelessly remote; darkly comic, even. Under the streets where cocktail bars sell spicy cucumber margaritas for £11, people are quietly living in squalor. 

We sit on a bench and drink coffee. Michaela’s baby is due in November. She has a heart-shaped womb, a congenital defect that can cause various complications, one of them being the risk of a miscarriage late in pregnancy. Since finding out in May, she hasn’t given the fact she is pregnant much consideration. It never really sunk in. 

“Like I know there is a human growing, but it’s one of them where I can’t, like—” 

She pauses. 

“Do you feel a bit dissociated?” I ask. 

“Yeah,” Michaela says. “I do.”