This week Inside Housing is running a special edition looking at the links between the housing crisis and coronavirus.

First up from me: why do so many of us live in HMOs? And what does this mean for our chances of self-isolating? https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/going-to-the-kitchen-is-scary-lockdown-puts-shared-rented-housing-in-the-spotlight-66416">https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/g...

Shared rented housing is growing rapidly: in 2012/13, there were an estimated 430,000 in England. Now there are 515,862.

The reason is primarily financial: landlords can get a 9% return from a HMO compared to a 6% return from letting a house

But this is driving a transformation of our housing stock. Large properties built for family housing have been purchased by small time investors and broken up into flat shares or AirBnBs. Due to the severe shortage of social housing, this is where many of the poorest end up.

But this has created the perfect conditions for infectious disease to spread, and makes self-isolating close to impossible. Nine in 10 renters in shared housing have said they could not isolate safely, compared with 1 in 3 in private rented housing generally.