Guillotines?

Let’s Lynch the Landlord

This is the best summary I could come up with:

This was welcomed by Conservative governments and Labour councils alike: the former rejoiced that rack-renting landlords were having to sell up to new owner-occupiers, while the latter enthusiastically repurposed existing private lets into new social housing stock.

With landlords desperate to sell, and councils having access to preferential public loans and grants, there was not even a need for compulsory purchases, and social housing stocks could grow cheaply, sustainably and without a single new brick being laid.

There is nothing that can be done about this.” Conservatives in the 1970s merely sought to retain a handful of petty landlords, who ought to be entitled to a “fair return” if they let out a spare room or two, but they recognised that private renting tends to be an expensive, poor-quality and economically wasteful way of accommodating the population.

Our insistence on pursuing policies that ensure that letting private property is an “economic proposition” not only drives up prices for would-be homeowners, but it stands in direct opposition to a programme of municipalising and decommodifying the homes that already exist.

It does not need to involve asphalting green belts, destroying precious amenities through “infilling”, converting office blocks into flats or wasting government money on quixotic home-ownership schemes.

We simply need to relearn the wisdom of the last century: to acknowledge that landlordism is the enemy of affordability, and to ensure that the housing economy is not defined by the staggering rental yields that our unregulated market can produce.

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