Against Landlords : How to Solve the Housing Crisis

When landlords always win and renters pay the price, what can be done? Housing means prosperity and security for some; poverty, precarity and sickness for others. More people live in private rented accommodation than ever before, and rents rise without apparent reason. Homes are smaller every year, and nearly 20 per cent of tenants live in hazardous conditions. Homelessness is at a new high. Yet the government’s only solution is to promote homeownership. Against Landlords shows that this crisis is not the product of happenstance or political incompetence. Government policy has intentionally split British citizens into homeowners and renters, two classes set on very different financial paths. In the UK, one out of every twenty-one adults is a landlord, and it is this group, and those who aspire to join it, represented by the political class. In his radical new interpretation of the housing crisis, lawyer Nick Bano explains how this environment set the conditions for the Grenfell Tower fire and how it means a life of anxiety for the nation’s renters. It is a problem that stretches far beyond London and one inherently racist in nature. Building more housing is not the solution. It is firstly a problem of the law, Bano argues, and reforms must sweep away the landlordism at the heart of the housing crisis and British political life. A radical new intervention into the housing debate in the UK, and what we can do about it Why do landlords always win, and renters pay the price? In his radical new interpretation of the housing crisis, lawyer Nick Bano proposes that it is rent not house prices that is at the core of the problem. Despite economic boom and bust, why has the cost of housing continued to skyrocket since the 1970s? Bano argues that rents have also continued to rise - supported by housing benefit payments and weakening housing laws on evictions - Britain has become a nation of renters and landlords. 1 in 24 UK residents are now landlords. The state has colluded with the market as social housing provision has been replaced by payments, spirally ever higher. Against Landlords shows that a permanent crisis is not a happenstance of global economics or political incompetence, but has been engineered on purpose. Such a crisis has resulted in the fire at Grenfell and widespread precarity for renters. Bano also shows that this is not just a London problem but can be seen across the country, and that it is inherently racist in nature. It instils anxiety and inequality in order to maintain ever increasingly profits. As a consequence, building more housing is not the solution. Bano's radical diagnosis show why the solutions proscribed by diverse experts have gone wrong, and what we should do about. It is firstly a problem of the law, and this demands immediate reform to questions of property and land values. Then, the laws concerning renting and landlordism. Finally, it is question of where to build and who for.