I was watching a video by Georgia Dow in which she talked about a study showing how fear drives people to be more conservative. What that reminded me of was the rationalization I keep stumbling upon almost every day lately: “the alternative is worse”.
We are mostly not revolutionaries willing to die for a cause. We just want to live our quiet lives, so we pay the thugs that offer us protection from themselves. The alternative is worse.
I can’t criticise people for trying to survive, but I think it’s important to be honest with ourselves. It’s all bad and the good option is really hard and a scary risk with too many sacrifices.
And let me get personal to drive the point home. Anxiety and depression are just my reality. I’m very isolated and avoid interactions as much as I can. I’m in a bad place and would totally tell you with great conviction that out there somewhere is worse. I also believe it could be amazing, but the chances of me suffering, actually, the certainty, makes me think it’s not worth it even trying.
Anyway. Be kind kind to yourselves, be kind to all the others, but be honest.
Obviously I cannot speak to what the situation is in the US, or even necessarily the entirety of the UK. I can just say that in my specific geographic area, it is largely second homes, holiday homes, AirBNBs, etc that are the problem, because the number of houses lost to the residential market through this is pretty much exactly the same as the number of households currently legally classed as homeless (which often means not necessarily on the streets, but being “housed” in hotel rooms and the like). If every single house that is not currently being used to home a family was confiscated from the owners of second homes, holiday lets, AirBNBs, etc and repurposed into residential housing, there would not be a housing crisis here.
Private landlords have, obviously, been raising rents in the last few years, but a big part of that is a matter of supply and demand. If one house gets 50+ families applying to rent it, of course prices are going to rise. We don’t tend to have multi-millionaires buying up huge swathes of houses here, with the average property “portfolio” being less than 5 houses. It’s simply not possible to get thousands of individual landlords to collude on prices, so if the actual problem - a lack of houses available to live in - was fixed, competition would be sufficient to keep prices under control. If no one is applying to rent a house because they’ve already found somewhere else to live, prices will drop quickly.