Against Landlords How to Solve the Housing Crisis

by Bano, Nick

• ISBN13: 9781804293874
• ISBN10: 1804293873
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781804293898
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2024-05-14
• Publisher: Verso
• More Book Details
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Summary

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.

Author Biography

Nick Bano is an author and Barrister who specialises in representing homeless people, residential occupiers, and destitute and migrant households. He has written in Tribune, the New Socialist, and Jacobin.

Table of Contents

Introduction: House-Price Capitalism

1. The Ratchet System
2. A Longer View
3. The Making of the English Language Class
4. Solving Things Ourselves: Tenant Organising
5. Illegitimate Concerns: Race and Housing
6. Everything Everywhere All at Once: Local Housing Crises
7. The House Always Wins?

Conclusion: A World without Landlords

Notes
Acknowledgements
Index