Title: Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis
Author: Nick Bano
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2024
Britain’s housing crisis is often spun as a tale of chronic lack of supply. Rents are at an all-time high because there aren’t enough homes to go around. A drastic increase in supply is, supposedly, the only solution. Against Landlords provides a refreshing alternative to the droning hymns of free-market proselytisers. As a housing barrister who represents tenants, migrants and destitute households, Bano’s salient and ardent analysis confronts the realities of the law, regulation and capitalism itself.
Yimbyism, shorthand for the ‘yes in my backyard’ movement, is arguably one of the most successful recent political exports from the US. The movement first gained momentum in San Francisco in the 2010s as a demand for more public housing in reaction to restrictive zoning laws. Now, it has transformed into a more generalised political position that asks us to do away with caution, liberalise our planning laws and let developers build, build, build – all with little consideration for things like the quality, security, and amenity of homes.
With galvanised support from developers, landlords, and the political class, alongside a group of apparent ‘grassroot’ activists, this supply-side argument has quickly shaped the contours of the housing debate in the UK. However, with some interrogation, it can be seen as little more than an expression of faith in the free market, and a repackaging of neoliberal ideology. Bano’s book takes this argument head on, and shows that to solve Britain’s housing crisis, we must understand that it is, first and foremost, rooted in class.
A nation of landlords
A disclaimer is made early on that the book will not focus on the ever-changing and rather granular statistics as its basis for analysis. Yet, Bano is sure to include stark truths, that ‘roughly one in every twenty-one adults [is a landlord]’. In doing so, he demonstrates a harsh reality: private landlordism is endemic in Britain. The extent to which our economy is so reliant on landlordism warrants its own term: ‘house-price capitalism’. House-price capitalism, perpetrated through the legal system, achieves its aims of perpetual rent increases and consequent growth in house values and wealth, ultimately at the cost of the tenant.
A chapter that outlines the resuscitation of the private landlord since Thatcher took power, ‘The Making of the English Landlord Class’, explains the deliberately enacted measures that make housing a vehicle of wealth transfer. A second affronting truth is highlighted: that homeownership as an aspiration that is both simultaneously an ideological replacement for the material decimation of the welfare state, and a tool to bolster the existence of the private landlord. Why own one property, when you could own two? It is a sobering chapter, and one that exposes how landlordism as a project deeply orients the political psyche and social fabric of Britain.
Against Landlords has garnered some notable reactions. The Institute of Economic Affairs free-market think tank, has, perhaps rather flatteringly, insinuated that Bano is something akin to Mao reincarnate. It comes as no shock that the institution that played such a big part in the removal of rent controls in Britain (see its 1972 Verdict on Rent Controls essays) isn’t exactly enthused at the prospect of a Marxist lawyer calling for the abolition of the private landlord. What is more surprising, though, is that Bano’s argument has revealed how even those on the left are wedded to the idea of under supply, with the likes of Novara Media’s Michael Walker telling Bano on a podcast, ‘I’m not convinced this idea of landlordism is a monopoly market’ and ‘rent controls can only work if there is increased supply’.
Housing and suffering
What feels exhausting about the current supply-focused debate is its willful omission of the true cost: human suffering. Undoubtedly, ever-increasing rents are more than burdensome for most, and for reasons that likely warrant no explanation. Yet the mainstream focus on a crisis-as-affordability and not crisis-by-design completely ignores the conditions reproduced by our current housing system: abject poverty, ill health, gentrification, insecurity, homelessness and even death.
With that said, this is a book that could have easily turned into an anthology of the more egregious cases of Bano’s career. But the commitment to an analysis, and not a regurgitation of these well-known injustices, feels welcomingly earnest. This sits in stark contrast to the media’s tendency to mine for individualised stories, which often fail to acknowledge the structural exploitation tenants face.
The Institute of Economic Affairs, an opaque free-market think tank, has, perhaps rather flatteringly, insinuated that Bano is something akin to Mao reincarnate
Instead, Bano makes an appeal that remains true to the distinctly Marxist nature of the book: to end the human drama, we must work towards a world in which homes are a site of humans flourishing, not suffering. The expectation of the reader is not one that asks us to conceive of ways to tinker with the current system. Rather, it is our responsibility to imagine housing beyond the primacy of the private landlord, beyond the homeowner, and ultimately, beyond commodification.
To build or not to build aside, perhaps the most contentious argument Bano makes – especially for those of us active in the housing movement and the left more broadly – is in regard to organising. A chapter titled ‘Solving Things Ourselves’ gives a succinct overview of the history of tenant organising in Britain. Starting with the 1915 Glasgow rent strikes, which led to the introduction of rent controls in Britain, and through to the emergence of new tenants’ unions and groups to what we see today, he asks the question: how should we organise?
Organising against landlords
In a 2020 New Socialist article titled ‘Critical Support for Tenants Unions’, Bano considers if the mass-membership model adopted by many organisations is the most effective means to enact solidarity and win. This criticism is again expressed in Against Landlords, although in a manner that suggests less hostility and communicates more genuine curiosity and sincerity. Those involved in the housing movement are well versed in this debate. Questions tangential to the former (like those of the tenant versus community union; of party affiliation; of long-term campaigning aims and so on) are often asked – and deservedly so. Bano is right to draw light to this conversation, as it is through addressing these internal conflicts that we realise the best way forward.
Yet, Bano’s questioning of the effectiveness of the mass-membership union model seems at odds with his later analysis. The very real threat and move towards financialised housing – with the emergence of the build-to-rent sector, the explosion of purpose-built student accommodation in university towns, alongside more insidious forms of this trend, the corporatisation of the social landlord and public-private development partnerships – which he points to towards the end of the book, demands that as tenants we must organise as a class.
The mass-membership union model, if done correctly, allows us to balance the more immediate and urgent needs of our comrades, such as eviction resistance, while allowing tenants to act as a political force in and of themselves. The future confrontations many of us anticipate with international capital, as opposed to the current, atomised conflicts with the individual petit-bourgeois landlord, require a tenant class that is not only active in resisting the worst ills of the system, but also grounded in a politically astute, long-term strategy. Spontaneous and reactive organising may achieve some wins, we have proof of that. But to gain the requisite power necessary to up-end the home as a commodity, it must be achieved by an organised tenant class which is large in number, disciplined in outlook and steadfast of its own longevity.
With that said, Against Landlords comes at a time in which both the ascendancy of the landlord and the worsening of housing conditions seem insurmountable. The analysis provided is a considerable effort to undermine the dominant narrative and offers one of hope. It remains clear then, the future is one which is free of the landlord, but we must win it first.
