How to evict your landlord

The hous­ing cri­sis is a tale of con­flict. The sys­tem of hous­ing wealth in Britain is char­ac­terised by con­flict between renters and own­ers, con­flict between gen­er­a­tions, between regions, between racial groups. The sim­ple fact that under­pins the bit­ter­ness we feel about our hous­ing sit­u­a­tion is that, in each case, the more dis­ad­van­taged of each of those groups is trans­fer­ring wealth to the bet­ter-off. Renters prop up house prices, as each month they jus­ti­fy the spec­u­la­tive val­ue of hous­ing assets by pay­ing an ever-increas­ing amount to ren­tiers. Whiter, old­er peo­ple in wealth­i­er areas ben­e­fit at the cost of every­one else.

Marx was at pains to point out that vir­tu­al­ly everyone’s eco­nom­ic inter­ests are aligned against those of land­lords. Ten­ants’ inter­ests obvi­ous­ly are, but employ­ers, too, have tend­ed to pre­fer low­er rents (and a con­se­quent­ly low­er wage bill). His­tor­i­cal­ly, states have leaned against exces­sive land spec­u­la­tion and pre­ferred to focus their poli­cies on prof­itable indus­tries, even where this comes at the price of dimin­ish­ing land­lords’ eco­nom­ic pow­er. But the key to under­stand­ing our hous­ing cri­sis is the real­i­sa­tion that hous­ing assets are now at the core of the nation­al econ­o­my. Because house prices are found­ed on ever-ris­ing rents, land­lords’ inter­ests and home­own­ers’ inter­ests have become elid­ed. And because home­own­er­ship and hous­ing wealth are so impor­tant to Britain’s post-indus­tri­al econ­o­my, renters’ inter­ests are in con­flict with the nation­al interest. 

In moments of eco­nom­ic flux, the state now rou­tine­ly tries to stim­u­late the prop­er­ty mar­ket at the expense of the rent­ing pop­u­la­tion. In 2022 the New States­man pub­lished data show­ing that the Hous­ing Ben­e­fit bill was so high that only three gov­ern­ment depart­ments – Health and Social Care, Edu­ca­tion, and Defence – have bud­gets that are big­ger than this sin­gle item of the Depart­ment for Work and Pen­sions’ spending.

But even that £23.4 bil­lion annu­al bill does not come close to alle­vi­at­ing pover­ty or hard­ship. On the con­trary: every time the gov­ern­ment low­ers stamp duty or under­writes mort­gages or funds devel­op­ers to gen­tri­fy work­ing-class dis­tricts, it dri­ves up hous­ing costs. These costs, of course, are mere­ly passed on to ten­ants and the state itself, due to the legal envi­ron­ment of unchecked rents. The City of Lon­don – which tra­di­tion­al­ly inter­venes when social spend­ing ris­es too high for its lik­ing – has been curi­ous­ly untrou­bled by these wast­ed billions.

But the legal frame­work upon which house-price cap­i­tal­ism was built has now become too suc­cess­ful for its own good. Homes are so valu­able that own­er­ship rates are declin­ing. Rents and hous­ing costs are pro­hib­i­tive for local work­ing pop­u­la­tions, and the con­tra­dic­tions of cap­i­tal­ism are on full dis­play. Labour mobil­i­ty – one of the orig­i­nal aims under­ly­ing inse­cure hous­ing – has been replaced with labour pre­car­i­ty, and with wage bills that are putting an unman­age­able strain on employ­ers. For the time being, though, gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy still seems to be aimed at squeez­ing as much wealth as pos­si­ble out of hous­ing, rather than under­min­ing or chang­ing the con­di­tions that make it so prof­itable in the first place.

The cri­sis has now reached a point where there will need to be polit­i­cal respons­es, and the cen­tral ques­tion is what our aims and meth­ods should be. Thank­ful­ly, a con­sen­sus has grown in recent years around the need to expand the stock of coun­cil hous­ing. For some read­ers, this might seem like a timid and rather sta­tist posi­tion, but there are two respons­es to that concern.

First­ly, reject­ing Engels’s argu­ment that noth­ing can be done about the hous­ing ques­tion unless pri­vate prop­er­ty itself is abol­ished, we can make great strides towards alle­vi­at­ing the sort of hous­ing mis­ery that we see today, even assum­ing that cap­i­tal­ism endures. We can reduce the inten­si­ty of our exploita­tion and hous­ing stress. Accom­mo­dat­ing peo­ple more cheap­ly, secure­ly and under good con­di­tions is by far the best method of achiev­ing that.

Sec­ond, pur­su­ing a mas­sive increase in coun­cil hous­ing may not, after all, be such a mod­er­ate pol­i­cy, because it chimes with some of the ear­li­est think­ing around com­mu­nism. Marx and Engels’s 1848 Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo calls not for the com­plete abo­li­tion of rent, but for rents to be paid as a form of tax­a­tion – which is effec­tive­ly what coun­cil rents are. The first demand of the Man­i­festo is for the ​‘abo­li­tion of prop­er­ty in land and appli­ca­tion of all rents of land to pub­lic pur­pos­es’. Coun­cil ten­ants pay their rents to the local author­i­ty, and the mon­ey can only be spent on the ​‘pub­lic pur­pose’ of fund­ing and main­tain­ing the coun­cil hous­ing itself.

While coun­cil hous­ing rents are not exact­ly the sort of gen­er­al tax­a­tion that Marx and Engels had in mind, mass social hous­ing would mean more rents going towards pub­lic pur­pos­es rather than pri­vate landown­ers. In the last cen­tu­ry, coun­cil hous­ing began to knock some of the rough­est edges off the cap­i­tal­ist mode of pro­duc­tion. This is the remark­able thing about the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry con­sen­sus around large-scale pub­lic hous­ing, and the Tories’ impres­sive record in build­ing it: there was a time when, to an extent, even arch-Thatcherites like Kei­th Joseph made com­mon cause with the communists.

In an 1872 speech in Man­ches­ter to the Inter­na­tion­al Work­ing men’s Asso­ci­a­tion, Marx argued that ​‘the social move­ment will lead to this deci­sion that the land can but be owned by the nation itself ’.4 A cen­tu­ry lat­er, the growth of the social state caused jour­nal­ist Simon Jenk­ins to write: ​‘It may well be that the days of pri­vate land own­er­ship, at least in the cen­tral areas of a city like Lon­don, are over.’ But all of that progress was undone. We dis­man­tled the coun­cil hous­ing sys­tem, and replaced it with one in which £88 bil­lion is paid to res­i­den­tial land­lords every year.

This is the point about a mass coun­cil hous­ing project: it does not ben­e­fit the ten­ants alone, but inter­feres sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of land. Even with­in a cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, it ​‘makes pos­si­ble a ratio­nal and demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem in which the allo­ca­tion of hous­ing ser­vices and hous­ing costs is no longer left to the hid­den, grasp­ing hand of the market’.5 And beyond that, if Jenk­ins is to be believed, the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry social state was so stag­ger­ing­ly suc­cess­ful that it threat­ened the nature of pri­vate landown­er­ship itself. With this in mind, James Connolly’s famous remark, ​‘For our demands most mod­er­ate are, we only want the earth’, begins to lose its sense of contradiction.

In the 1980s, the state delib­er­ate­ly halt­ed the ter­mi­nal decline of the pri­vate land­lord. It was with­in our grasp, and we reversed it. When we talk about abol­ish­ing land­lordism, it is not pie-in-the sky. In fact it is prob­a­bly more imme­di­ate­ly achiev­able than, say, police or prison abo­li­tion. As far back as 1965, the Mil­ner Hol­land com­mit­tee felt the need to advise the Dou­glas-Home gov­ern­ment: ​‘We do not think that the role of pri­vate land­lords is finished.’

Both the left and the right then spent the next fif­teen years becom­ing increas­ing­ly con­vinced that the writ­ing was on the wall for pri­vate­ly rent­ed homes; today, we need land­lords to regain that sense of per­il if we are to fix this cri­sis. For the time being, how­ev­er, the divine right of land­lords is so deeply entrenched that there is a media pan­ic when­ev­er a polit­i­cal par­ty moots intro­duc­ing pet-friend­ly poli­cies for tenants. 

Dur­ing the Vic­to­ri­an exper­i­ment in ​‘5 per cent phil­an­thropy’, there was a com­plaint among the ​‘eth­i­cal’ investors that the bet­ter social land­lords (notably Peabody Trust) were under­cut­ting the com­pe­ti­tion, there­by ren­der­ing the 5 per cent invest­ment schemes unprof­itable. The sec­re­tary of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Asso­ci­a­tion was anx­ious that Peabody was ​‘at least 30 per cent under the mar­ket, and they are work­ing a seri­ous injury against us’. This is pre­cise­ly the point. Large-scale, non-prof­it-seek­ing mod­els of hous­ing pro­vi­sion are capa­ble of dri­ving rent-seek­ers out of busi­ness, and that must be our aim.

This may be the per­fect moment for revis­it­ing munic­i­pal­i­sa­tion. A col­lapse in hous­ing val­ues both after the Sec­ond World War and again in the 1970s meant that pub­lic author­i­ties were primed to take over own­er­ship of land and hous­ing. Where pref­er­en­tial loans and pub­lic grants are avail­able, and falling val­ues mean that land­lords are keen to sell, con­di­tions are per­fect for replen­ish­ing social hous­ing stocks in the form of exist­ing build­ings. And hous­ing, of course, tends to pay for itself in the longer term.

The only con­cern is that new-build con­struc­tion stan­dards in Britain are so noto­ri­ous­ly bad that local author­i­ties may end up with expen­sive, and pos­si­bly dan­ger­ous, pri­vate­ly built stock. But rebuild­ing coun­cil hous­ing as a move towards the decom­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of hous­ing must be at the heart of our project. The worst thing we could do after any house-price crash would be to wind the hous­ing cri­sis back up again.

The prob­lem faced by oppo­nents of rent con­trols is that their main pub­lic-rela­tions tac­tic is the scare sto­ry. They bor­row dis­as­ters from oth­er times and places, and attempt to make us wor­ry about ​‘shad­ow mar­kets’ or ​‘dis­ap­pear­ing land­lords’. But in the con­text of such a severe hous­ing cri­sis, these coun­ter­fac­tu­als sound like some­thing of a relief. It would be very dif­fi­cult for the land­lord lob­by to come up with a sit­u­a­tion that is much worse than what we have today.

Rent con­trols are more than just a weak com­pro­mise with the land­lord class, a stag­ing post on the route to a bet­ter soci­ety. When they work, just like large-scale coun­cil hous­ing, they cre­ate the con­di­tions for reduc­ing or elim­i­nat­ing the exploita­tive pri­vate rent­ed sec­tor. Again, the expe­ri­ence of the 1970s shows us how rent con­trols can work to par­tial­ly decom­mod­i­fy hous­ing mar­kets to great effect. It was only fifty years ago that polit­i­cal par­ties and activists were mak­ing seri­ous plans for a post-land­lord soci­ety, and we should wel­come any step that brings us clos­er to that situation.

This is what is so frus­trat­ing about so much of the hous­ing pol­i­cy debate over the last few years. Today’s accounts of the hous­ing cri­sis are invari­ably based on neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics. This has led to elab­o­rate debates about the pre­cise effects of hous­ing sup­ply, a con­fect­ed con­flict between NIM­BYs and YIM­BYs, and a uni­ver­sal accep­tance that there is a hous­ing short­age. And – while every­one acknowl­edges that things are very bad, and that there is a need for dras­tic inter­ven­tion of some kind – polit­i­cal par­ties wring their hands and claim that pan­der­ing to prop­er­ty devel­op­ers is the only viable solu­tion. This dis­plays a com­plete igno­rance of the his­to­ry of hous­ing and land pol­i­cy. It shows that we have for­got­ten about the price con­trols that dom­i­nat­ed hous­ing pol­i­cy through­out the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, and that their strate­gies were far more suc­cess­ful than our own. We used to know about the ways in which laws had an effect on land and hous­ing pro­vi­sion; it now seems as if we have even for­got­ten how to talk about these ideas. 

Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the 100 per cent devel­op­ment charge This was specif­i­cal­ly designed to damp­en a fren­zy of post-war com­mer­cial prop­er­ty spec­u­la­tion, and it was very effec­tive. ​‘Land val­ues are being, by this Bill, sub­stan­tial­ly deflat­ed’, boast­ed Hugh Dal­ton, Attlee’s chan­cel­lor of the exche­quer; ​‘this source of land spec­u­la­tion will be stopped for ever’. Dal­ton claimed, over-ambi­tious­ly: ​‘we are mov­ing towards the nation­al­i­sa­tion of the land, and not by slow steps’. Indeed, he described the mea­sure in par­lia­ment as being ​‘the work­ers’ revenge for the enclosures’.

Imag­ine how a seri­ous gov­ern­ment could put such a damp­en­ing mea­sure into force today. A sim­ple, rad­i­cal tax mea­sure could bring an instant halt to a sys­tem pred­i­cat­ed on price spec­u­la­tion. If there were a 100 per cent cap­i­tal gains tax, it would be in no one’s inter­est for house prices to go up. If we want­ed to, we could end house-price spec­u­la­tion instant­ly, as the ten­ants’ revenge for the immense wealth that the hous­ing cri­sis has prised from them. 

Real­is­ti­cal­ly, though, reform is unlike­ly to be as dra­mat­ic or sharp as that; but there is cause for opti­mism. Years before I start­ed writ­ing, no-fault evic­tions had been some­thing of a hob­by-horse of mine, and I had been try­ing hard to per­suade peo­ple of the eco­nom­ic con­se­quences of unsta­ble ten­an­cies. But there was no appetite for reform in Eng­land. Nation­al hous­ing char­i­ties seemed to treat a cam­paign for pri­vate-sec­tor secu­ri­ty as polit­i­cal­ly naïve, and even a Cor­byn-led Labour Par­ty start­ed out by recy­cling Cameron- and Miliband-era pledges of short ​‘fam­i­ly friend­ly’ tenancies.

A 2018 oppo­si­tion Green Paper, Hous­ing for the Many, con­tained some fair­ly tired mate­r­i­al focus­ing on the social sec­tor. Some col­leagues and I draft­ed a response on behalf of the Soci­ety of Labour Lawyers explain­ing the need for the abo­li­tion of sec­tion 21, and in late 2018 it felt like a demand that was out­ra­geous and obscure in equal mea­sure. But – to our amaze­ment – the Labour front bench sud­den­ly com­mit­ted to the pol­i­cy a few months lat­er, in March 2019. While we will nev­er know whether any­one at the Labour Par­ty had even read our pitch, what is cer­tain is that each of the oth­er major polit­i­cal par­ties felt the need to match Labour’s pledge at that year’s gen­er­al elec­tion, and we went into the 2019 par­lia­ment with an unim­peach­able polit­i­cal con­sen­sus in favour of dis­man­tling a key ele­ment of Thatch­erism. The effects of that change are like­ly to be felt in the medi­um and long term rather than imme­di­ate­ly. But we may be head­ing towards the sort of legal frame­work that was in place before the present hous­ing cri­sis start­ed to take shape.

Many of the pro­pos­als for hous­ing reform that are advanced today focus on tax reform. Com­men­ta­tors see the vast wealth that hous­ing gen­er­ates, and con­sid­er it to be an impor­tant, rad­i­cal mea­sure to cap­ture some of that wealth and deploy it for social­ly use­ful pur­pos­es. But these meth­ods can be quite dif­fi­cult to put into effect. Despite the enthu­si­as­tic efforts of move­ments like the Geor­gists in the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies, tax advo­cates rou­tine­ly come to find that land is only eas­i­ly tax­able at the point of sale – which hap­pens rarely – and that efforts to impose ongo­ing land tax­a­tion require both a sophis­ti­cat­ed appa­ra­tus for valu­ing land and liq­uid­i­ty on the part of the landown­er, which is not always fea­si­ble when land has quick­ly appre­ci­at­ed in value.

But, more fun­da­men­tal­ly, there is some­thing of a ten­sion between mea­sures that aim to cap­ture land­ed wealth and poli­cies that seek to under­mine its val­ue in the first place. We can be intense­ly relaxed about house-price growth as long as the spec­u­la­tors pay their tax­es; or we can take the Hugh Dal­ton line of using the law to deflate prop­er­ty val­ues. The lat­ter aims to solve the hous­ing cri­sis, while the for­mer seeks mere­ly to off­set some of its effects. There seems to be lit­tle point in main­tain­ing a sit­u­a­tion in which peo­ple face very high hous­ing costs but some of the mon­ey is recouped by the state, when we could aim instead to low­er those hous­ing costs dras­ti­cal­ly in the first place.

A few years ago, a friend of mine was look­ing after a cat as part of a scheme that fos­ters pets belong­ing to fam­i­lies who are tem­porar­i­ly home­less as a result of flee­ing domes­tic vio­lence. My friend had a week’s hol­i­day booked, and asked if the cat could stay in my shared flat. I made the mis­take of run­ning it past our let­ting agent, who refused out­right. There was an increas­ing­ly bit­ter exchange of emails in which I asked whether they had even both­ered to ask the land­lord (they had not, but it was pol­i­cy). I tend to pride myself on main­tain­ing my cool, lawyer­ly demeanour in almost all of my deal­ings, but a red mist began to descend. Shane McGowan’s lyrics from ​‘The Bas­tard Land­lord’ echoed around my head and raised my blood pres­sure. I end­ed up send­ing some replies that I am now too ashamed to recall.

Leav­ing aside for a moment the more direct harm of evic­tions, rent increas­es and ten­an­cy churn, land­lords and their agents have an extra­or­di­nary degree of day-to-day con­trol over soci­ety: 2.5 mil­lion total­ly unre­mark­able peo­ple dic­tate the behav­iour of 4.4 mil­lion house­holds. Can I have a pet? Can I hang a pic­ture? Can I replace the lumpy ​‘land­lord spe­cial’ mat­tress on the ​‘land­lord spe­cial’ dou­ble divan, on which I am required to sleep every night? Our thoughts turn to the deposit when­ev­er some­thing hap­pens to the phys­i­cal space, and we spend thou­sands on util­i­ty bills rather than both­er­ing our exploiters with com­plaints about leak­ing pipes and ancient boilers.

Rent­ing in Britain is so deeply infan­til­is­ing that – where it does not build resent­ment and rage – it is bound to feed into a sense of indi­vid­ual infe­ri­or­i­ty towards the land­lord or their twen­ty-year old prop­er­ty man­ag­er. We have, I sus­pect, also seen the de-skilling of a gen­er­a­tion, as mil­lions of peo­ple have no expe­ri­ence of car­ry­ing out works on their own homes. And we are pay­ing well over the odds, in inter­na­tion­al or his­tor­i­cal terms, for the privilege.

Engels’s argu­ment that there is always a hous­ing cri­sis under cap­i­tal­ism was pred­i­cat­ed on the idea of con­stant and acute hous­ing short­age. But that is not the cri­sis we face. We are the heirs to record-break­ing amounts of munic­i­pal con­struc­tion (much of which still phys­i­cal­ly exists), and to an econ­o­my built upon prop­er­ty devel­op­ment. The vast major­i­ty of homes in Eng­land and Wales – about 70 per cent – are unde­r­oc­cu­pied. Scarci­ty of build­ings is not the prob­lem. We have a rel­a­tive abun­dance, in his­tor­i­cal or geo­graph­i­cal­ly com­par­a­tive terms, but a cri­sis of price. And cri­sis, as explained in the pre­vi­ous chap­ter, tends to reach a point at which it needs to resolve itself. House-price cap­i­tal­ism may final­ly begin to enter a phase of decline.

What has struck me most while writ­ing this book is how Marx’s point about urban rents being, in effect, monop­oly prices has been proved right over and over again. It seems aston­ish­ing that the point is not made more often. We have seen exam­ples from Vic­to­ri­an Britain, from fin de siè­cle Naples, from colo­nial Mum­bai, from Hong Kong, and else­where: through­out mod­ern his­to­ry, unreg­u­lat­ed land mar­kets have led to dete­ri­o­rat­ing con­di­tions and soar­ing rents, even where wages have stag­nat­ed or fall­en. To those I would add prob­a­bly the most per­ti­nent exam­ple from a con­tem­po­rary British per­spec­tive: 1990s Cairo. In that decade, a land boom over­took both tourism and man­u­fac­tur­ing, mak­ing it Egypt’s third-largest non-oil invest­ment sec­tor, and vast amounts of hous­ing were built. But the glut of new build­ings only made the hous­ing cri­sis worse. Squalor inten­si­fied, and low­er-waged work­ers were pushed into a dis­tant peri-urban sprawl. ​‘Upwards of a mil­lion apart­ments stand emp­ty’, wrote a con­tem­po­rary observ­er. ​‘There is no hous­ing short­age per se. In fact, Cairo is filled with build­ings that are half-empty.’

The sim­ple fact is that, where rents are unre­strained by law, they can reach monop­oly prices – and those monop­oly prices deter­mine land val­ues. Build­ing more hous­ing is an arti­cle of faith, but there is lit­tle point in increas­ing sup­ply if the legal and eco­nom­ic con­di­tions will always allow the grasp­ing hand of the mar­ket to feel around for the lim­its of people’s means.

Hous­ing is, of course, one of many inter­con­nect­ed issues. The hous­ing cri­sis – the need to main­tain hous­ing val­ue and extract wealth – rests upon inad­e­quate sys­tems of pen­sions, wages and pub­lic ser­vices. A com­mon inter­est is shared between those who intend to retire and the main­tain­ers of the hous­ing cri­sis, so it is dif­fi­cult to unpick the rela­tion­ship between the two. But, on the oth­er side of the equa­tion, a com­mon inter­est is also shared between hous­ing cri­sis oppo­nents and oth­er groups. The class of home­own­ers is shrink­ing, and the needs of renters and home­less peo­ple are becom­ing more urgent than demands for pen­sions. But, per­haps more impor­tant­ly, there is a grow­ing con­ver­gence between hous­ing and envi­ron­men­tal concerns.

When future gen­er­a­tions come to study the begin­nings of the end of the world, even the most unob­ser­vant and ide­o­log­i­cal­ly mind­ed will have to con­cede that its caus­es began with cap­i­tal­ism. A sys­tem pred­i­cat­ed on pri­vate accu­mu­la­tion, and wil­ful­ly blind to social need, is at the heart of cli­mate break­down. Nowhere is this more obvi­ous than in the built environment.

On a rou­tine basis, we see the rit­u­al tear­ing-down of viable build­ings for rede­vel­op­ment. Large pub­licly built estates like Cen­tral Hill in south Lon­don are being demol­ished before our eyes, then rebuilt for sale at a high­er price – rais­ing costs for every one local­ly, and dri­ving poor­er peo­ple away; and even based on the local authority’s case, the net gain in the num­ber of homes is slim. This is a gross act of eco­log­i­cal van­dal­ism and social vio­lence, mas­querad­ing as a solu­tion to the hous­ing cri­sis. There is an ever more press­ing case for wind­ing down house-price cap­i­tal­ism on eco­log­i­cal grounds, as we con­tin­ue to exceed our plan­e­tary boundaries.

With each pass­ing year, the grow­ing gen­er­a­tion of renters has less to lose. By def­i­n­i­tion, it has no assets. Its rent­ed homes are not par­tic­u­lar­ly worth fight­ing for. The pace of plan­e­tary destruc­tion increas­es. The forces that dri­ve its polit­i­cal com­mit­ment are becom­ing ever more pow­er­ful. Both Black Lives Mat­ter and the Stanst­ed 15 pro­test­ers took direct action to block run­ways because they want­ed to draw atten­tion to the inter­twined nature of cli­mate break­down, colo­nial­ism, depor­ta­tions and fos­sil fuels. In a sim­i­lar way, the hous­ing move­ment would do well to com­bine its ener­gies with cli­mate and anti-racism activists to ensure that prop­er­ty devel­op­ment los­es its cen­tral role in the debate over the hous­ing cri­sis. We must draw atten­tion to its inher­ent racism and its eco­log­i­cal destruc­tive­ness, as well as its impov­er­ish­ing effects.

The sys­tem of house-price growth was not designed to be wound down gen­tly or peace­ful­ly. As a coun­try, we have bet the farm on house prices, and suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments have been under­stand­ably cau­tious about alter­ing the laws designed to encour­age homes to become more expen­sive. But the scale of the harm of this sys­tem can no longer be denied. We owe it to our­selves to change things. We owe it, in par­tic­u­lar, to the deceased and sur­vivors of Gren­fell. We owe it also to peo­ple like Daniel Gauntlett, a home­less man who died of cold out­side a board­ed-up bun­ga­low a few months after squat­ting was crim­i­nalised, sac­ri­ficed to a tem­po­rary moral pan­ic about prop­er­ty val­ues; to Miza­nur Rah­man, who died from a fire in an East End slum in 2023, with­in a mile of a major world finan­cial cen­tre; to Awaab Ishak, who died, aged two, after his social land­lord blamed his par­ents for the dan­ger­ous mould in their rent­ed home; and to the home­less peo­ple dying at a rate of one every six-and-a-half hours. We owe it to the count­less peo­ple who have suf­fered psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal harm or dis­tress as a result of hous­ing insta­bil­i­ty, or were dri­ven away from their homes and com­mu­ni­ties by ever-increas­ing costs.

By meth­ods as pro­sa­ic as law reform, we can work towards decom­mod­i­fy­ing hous­ing, and dri­ve land­lords and house-price spec­u­la­tors from the face of the earth. We have done it before, and we must do it again.

Against Land­lords is pub­lished by Ver­so books and is out now.

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