BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Renters Unite!
By Jacob Stringer
Published by Pluto Books, 2025, rrp £14.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Hastings, and indeed many places in England, is experiencing a significant rise in rental prices, ‘driven by demand’ as there is way too little property available to rent. Much property that could be made available to renters is in fact only available as holiday lets, a more lucrative option for landlords than rental. The excessive cost of mortgages is kettling many of us into long-term, often life-time rental, exacerbated by the banks, which, despite the fact that rent is usually cheaper than a mortgage on a similar or often even a bigger property, will not lend to low-income applicants.
I put ‘driven by demand’ in quotes as it needs unpacking. Despite special pleading by certain landlords and lettings agencies around costs to them, which of course are real and often not negligible, it is not ‘costs’ that result in rent increases; nor is it ‘demand’. It is linked more closely to ‘what the market will bear’. This is another way of saying that it is based on greed and usury. Of course it is ‘Not all landlords!’, but it is only ever landlords, to borrow from the #MeToo movement. My own landlord is not a greedhead, and as she lets to me without an agency involved, she is not constantly pressured to raise my rent to the ‘market value’. If she did, I’d have been homeless years ago.
A HOUSING CRISIS DRIVEN BY GREED AND USARY
But I know that I am very lucky in this. Almost everyone I know that rents has experienced year-on-year rent increases. £50 a month extra for a few years in a row, equating to £600 extra a year over a decade, for example, has literally doubled and more than doubled some of my friends’ rental costs. And these are not the worst cases by far. Add the hateful Section 21 eviction orders to, for example, push someone out only to put the flat straight back on the market at double the rent or as Airbnb (you know who you are), and we have a real housing crisis driven by greed and usury.
And this unveils a fundamental set of facts. OUR EARNINGS become THEIR INCOME. Of course, this is true of any transaction in a market economy. But rent is in almost every case, by a large margin, a person’s greatest expenditure, and one that too often needs to supplant appropriate heating and nutritional needs, especially as ‘the cost-of-living crisis’ increases (mostly more greed and usury – witness our water, electrics, supermarket bills increase mapped against insane profit increases for suppliers and their stockholders). And yet our ‘rights’ regarding this excessive expense are often rather less protected than consumer rights on, say, a new kettle. I am of the opinion that a roof over one’s head should be seen as a fundamental right, along with sufficient food and warmth, but our globalised market economy sees that as anathema, a threat to profits to be stamped out. In Trumpian terms, ‘communism’ (try not to laugh, or cry).
A FIGHTBACK TODAY IS A HARDER TASK
Now, obviously, as certain landlords may have pointed out in these pages, such costs add to a landlord’s costs too. This is, up to a point, a legitimate complaint. But only up to a point. As we all must be aware by now, surely, ‘trickledown’ is only ever a tiny drip from the billions hoarded by the super-rich, and in a failing economy like ours it becomes a torrent fountaining upwards with no trickledown at all. This sucks yet more energy from the economic base, deepening the crisis. Current government policy seems no better than the austerity-obsessed Tory government policies.
How do we deal with this? Since the removal of rent tribunals and rent controls in the 1980s things have generally become worse for those of us trapped in a rent economy. Before that we had a rich tapestry of community-based organisations, not only in housing, fighting for tenants’ rights and squatters rights, but across the whole of ‘working class’ society. A fightback today is a harder task, as rebuilding always takes far more energy than destruction.
But… Renters can Unite! Stringer’s book covers a global perspective on the fight for our rights, and the revival of the fight here too. His focus in the chapters on the UK are based around his experience with tenants unions such as ‘London Renters Union’, of which he is a member, and associated unions such as ACORN, who have a presence here in Hastings. Read this book from an in-depth analysis of how such unions work, and how they succeed. Many examples include a firm political stance, others are much less concerned with context, fighting instead each battle as it comes. There is a good argument for looking at wider issues and uniting across larger areas, for long-term success, but national policy is harder to influence than it is to appeal to your peers in your home town: thus, both approaches (and others) can work. However, which path you choose, ‘stronger together’ applies, and you ARE NOT ALONE!
If you are interested in joining ACORN, or just learning more about tenant unions, you can contact Hastings branch by emailing Naomi Gann at [email protected]
Renters Unite! Is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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