BOOKBUSTER REVIEW – Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis
By Nick Bano
Published by Verso, rrp £16.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Nick Bano is a barrister and has a different take on the causes of our current housing crisis than is usual. Economists tend to talk about ‘rent-gap’ theory, expecting actual rents to rise only if rental properties are improved, or to agree that a lack of housing stock is the problem. Bano says that in fact ‘they rise on existing residential buildings without any significant improvements to homes’, and puts much of the steep rise in rents down to ‘a deliberate government policy of state-backed rent-raising’. He gives considerable space to explaining how – a process he calls ‘the ratchet system’.
As is all too apparent, ‘tenants are all but powerless to say no to rent increases, because they all know what might happen if they do’. Section 21 notices are notorious and toxic. In Hastings I’d guess, from anecdotal evidence, that in fact maybe 50% of evictions are currently due to house sales, possibly in some cases due to mortgage interest rises. ‘The logic of “I want my property back’’ has no regard to the human drama that this necessarily sets in motion.’
THEY TAKE POSSESSION LIKE COLONISING FERAL CATS
Here is a pithy quote from a recent Socialist Project article, The Unhoused: Scapegoating Politics and Housing Struggles, by Adolph Reed Jr: ‘the separation of homelessness as an issue from its roots in publicly subsidized real estate profiteering and the proliferation of low-wage employment and underemployment’. This clearly illustrates the void opening up under the 40% of us that rent.
But Bano also goes against ‘received wisdom’ on the question of new-builds. As Jonathan Meades put it, in the London Review of Books (23/05/24), ‘Today’s volume builders, patently less accomplished than those of the 1920s and 1930s, hoard and ‘land-bank’ plots. They take possession, spraying their demesnes like colonising feral cats. Their behaviour is sanctioned by the Tory Party, which they wholly own, and by timid, somnolent Labour. Then, when the moment is deemed propitious, they dump repetitive boxes on their territory.’ Here in Hastings, ‘affordable’ housing – always actually unaffordable or at least out of our reach due to mortgage rules, whereby you can pay a high rent but apparently not an often-lower mortgage – barely exists anyway. And social housing elements are dodged regardless of HBC planning requirements.
THE MARKET IS BASED ON GREED
Naturally Bano critiques Housing Benefit, calling it the ‘landlord subsidy’, the benefit being a primary reason those of us in precarious employment can’t afford ‘affordable housing’. This critique takes us on a detailed analysis of what is nowadays called ‘rentier capitalism’, which is to say, capitalist profit with no productivity attached, a core post-industrial last gasp for capitalism that massively exacerbates the poverty gap. Although housing benefits ‘may have been designed to alleviate severe poverty’ they in fact ‘merely serve to ensure that housing costs can keep rising […as they] interact with the system of untrammelled rents in the private sector’.
These ‘perpetually rising rents’ are a uniquely ‘safe’ form of investment. If inflation makes your mortgage interest too high, raise the rent, or sell. I have zero sympathy for this conundrum, landlords have only themselves to blame, at a minimum I would ban second-home and buy-to-let unless no mortgage is required to make the investment in the first place. Historically, things weren’t so easy, but the deregulation of the private rented sector (and everything else) has blown the lid on the market, which is based on greed, an ‘I’m alright Jack’ culture, with no rent controls or tribunals to appeal to. These are the bastard children of Thatcherism, and her spawn rule free across our backs ever more gleefully. With an election due next month, we can hope for change, but as the elite in all parties are very often landlords themselves, and anyway cornered daily by construction industry lobbyists etc, while we stick a pencilled cross on a bit of paper every five years, I expect little change.
A WORLD WITHOUT LANDLORDS
Regardless, Bano takes a similar path as Ken Livingstone did when London mayor, insisting that in fact there is quite sufficient housing stock and unused repurposable business stock to cover our needs, in a more equitable society. In Cornwall in 2021 one journalist said Rightmove had 52 houses available to rent, but 10,000 active Airbnb listings, and this is not unrepresentative. Bano’s case is a radical one, as the title of the book suggests. As a barrister, he has specialised in bringing cases against landlords, and local authorities.
He gives a chapter over to tenant organising, deeply informed by his experience and his historical perspective encompassing past successes, and failures. This includes an analysis of race and empire impact of the housing system, especially in London. He rightly sees ‘right to buy’ as a double-edged sword. All new council housing will still be required to include ‘right to buy’, which makes it a hard sell for cash-strapped councils. Ironically, first introduced under Labour in the 70s, albeit weaponised under Thatcher, it needs to go, along with second homes and ‘buy-to-holiday let’, indeed all ‘buy-to-let’ except under public ownership, and to address the estimated 70% of homes that are ‘underoccupied’.
The closing chapter is entitled ‘Conclusion: A World without Landlords’. Recommending, amongst other things, law reform, he says ‘we can work towards decommodifying housing, and drive landlords and house-price speculators from the face of the earth. We have done it before, and we must do it again.’ In the current ongoing housing crisis, this is the sort of radicalism we need.
Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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