The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis ( www.theguardian.com )

quindraco , 3 months ago

I skimmed the article, but I missed the actual meat of the proposal. Did anyone catch how landlords are supposed to be abolished? Would they just… ban charging rent and leave it up to judges to define “rent”?

mozz OP , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It doesn't say, which is a little weird. This article explains it better.

Basically as I understand it, before the 1980s, the government owned a lot of the housing and rented it to people at fixed prices. This meant that renting your property out purely for profit was tough, and a lot of landlords actually sold their property to the government as council housing. That changed under Thatcher, who enabled private sales of the council housing, which originally sounded like a good idea (you can own the home you're already living in instead of renting it from the government), but increased privatization led to rent for profit led to inflation of monthly rent led to oh no.

The simple fix I suspect, is for the government to start buying up properties again for rent-at-reasonable-prices to tenants, competing with private landlords and poking a hole in the bubble of ever-increasing rents (with popping the bubble giving a lot of extra leverage of societal benefit as compared with the amount of money they're actually putting into the system.)

Kusimulkku , 3 months ago

Sounds a lot like what municipalities in Finland are doing. A lot of the cities have city owned rental properties and actively develop land as part of city planning.

some_guy , 3 months ago

That changed under Thatcher

Reagan and Thatcher engineered the hell we live in (in these two countries, anyway).

Nemo , 3 months ago

Early on:

Rent controls, secure tenancies and high interest rates

were how landlords were put out of business the first time. Not regulation, but economic levers that made renting out property unprofitable.

Presumably, these levers still exist and can be pulled. It’s mentioned right after that the Thatcher administration worked to undo these effects, but the article moved on without further discussing how in detail.

Kusimulkku , 3 months ago

Rent controls for private rents can be tricky. Sometimes it leads to money paid under the counter on top of rent, which is of course undesirable in a few ways. But having publicly owned (municipal etc) rental properties are an easier way to push rents down. But that also has a lot of trickiness in it.