While we’re all sharing shitty landlord stories, I’ll throw mine on the pile. I’m across the pond, but this article still resonated with me. In my current area, there is not a lot of apartment...
While we’re all sharing shitty landlord stories, I’ll throw mine on the pile. I’m across the pond, but this article still resonated with me.
In my current area, there is not a lot of apartment housing. Most places have waitlists, and you pay through the nose for some truly crappy lodgings.
My husband and I lived in a 900 sq. ft, no frills, badly-put-together apartment.
Before our lease came up for renewal, the property company sent us notice that our rent would be going up by 20%, to well above $2000 per month. (At the time, this was very high, but it also looks kind of quaint by post-COVID renting standards).
Seeing this, we went “oh SHIT” and ended up drastically accelerating our home-buying timeline, which we hadn’t even started at that point. We ended up finding a house, but wouldn’t be able to close before our lease was up.
We only needed an extra month though, so, immediately after signing a new month-to-month lease with the apartment, I notified the property manager that we would be moving out in 30 days (effectively staying only one month of our month-to-month lease).
I was taken aback when he told me, flat out, “you cannot do that.”
I said that I absolutely could.
Meanwhile, he fished around in my paperwork and then swore. He then told me a page was “missing” from what he had me sign. On that page was language that we would have had to have given THREE months’ notice, even on a month-to-month lease.
The guy flat out admitted this to me, and I’m still not sure why. It’s super scummy. I wouldn’t have ever signed something like that in the first place, but they no doubt rely on people not reading the pages of legalese closely and trapping people with that gotcha.
He had to accept our 30 day notice, but he was very clearly not happy about it. He didn’t even try to keep up the pretense of politeness with me. He was openly angry with me because he wasn’t able to screw me over.
The mortgage payment on the house we got was over $600 lower than our rent. We later refinanced into a 20-year loan instead of our original 30, and our payments are STILL less than we would have been paying in rent there.
I was talking with a substitute teacher at my school the other day who is in his 70s. He mentioned that he and his wife were living in that same apartment complex, and I told him to be careful because they raised the rent on us so sharply. Turns out they had already done the same thing to him. He actually broke down, almost in tears, talking about how he didn’t know what he was going to do.
There’s nowhere for them to move to; they can’t buy a house at their age and on a fixed income; and they are trying to stay afloat on medical payments. The fact that he’s substitute teaching in his 70s when he should be relaxing and enjoying retirement means that they are hurting for money, and this predatory property company is bleeding them dry — just like they tried to do to us.
The worst part is, when I look up the property company, it’s huge. They have many multi-million dollar properties. Apartments, hotels, and the kind of mega mansions the Kardashians would own or vacation in. The company clearly doesn’t need to be so vampiric with its tenants, but, then again, doing that is probably what enabled them to have such a portfolio in the first place.
It just kind of hurts to know that they’re monetarily rewarded for such antisocial behavior.
I have no doubt that hundreds of tenants in that one complex alone have fallen prey to the rent raise trap and the three month notice bullshit. And those are only the two scummy practices I know about. I’m sure there’s far more behind the curtain that I’m not aware of. Also, when I scale those practices up, beyond just my one complex to their entire property portfolio, it makes me shudder.
I didn’t see that article. Thanks for sharing. It hits close to home. For my first ten years of teaching I was in high cost of living areas, teaching in low-income schools, and making a salary...
I didn’t see that article. Thanks for sharing. It hits close to home.
For my first ten years of teaching I was in high cost of living areas, teaching in low-income schools, and making a salary that only allowed me to barely squeak by. I specifically moved to a higher-income area with better teacher salaries because I was tired of making pennies.
This reminds me of my current landlord in the US: I rented the unit and moved in, surprised to see that there was no door to the bedroom and no door to the bathroom. There is a door into the area...
This reminds me of my current landlord in the US:
I rented the unit and moved in, surprised to see that there was no door to the bedroom and no door to the bathroom. There is a door into the area that locks, but I can look myself in the bathroom mirror from my bedroom. When I asked about it, they condescendingly told me "it's an ensuite, this is normal," even though the floorplan marked these doors.
The door to the w/d doesn't close either, and is inside my ensuite. The w/d is the cheapest stackable GE unit available and is extremely loud (my apple watch has told me off for being in a loud space without hearing protection when standing next to it). So the door itself is a non-functioning nuisance.
The landlord lets themselves and their contractors in whenever they please. I used to work from home all the time, and was on a call only to get a notification from my smart lock that the front door was unlocked. I stepped away, only to find 3 contract electricians in my living room, with keys to my unit, unescorted by the landlord.
Oh, they also make me replace my own AC filter quarterly, under threat of a $45 fine if they notice I didn't do it. I have yet to find another property where this is a thing, but they swear up and down that this is normal behavior.
In Portugal the landlord doesn't have the keys to a property rented to someone else (unless the tenant specifically wants them to). They can request an "inspection" of the property, but it has to...
In Portugal the landlord doesn't have the keys to a property rented to someone else (unless the tenant specifically wants them to). They can request an "inspection" of the property, but it has to be scheduled in advance and the tenant has to let them in. In the event of non payment / breach of contract the landlord can call a locksmith to try to get inside and remove the tenant, but otherwise I believe this behavior would be trespassing.
Not to say our housing market is anything to be proud of. It's pretty bad, especially in Lisbon, and most landlords are pretty terrible AFAIK. Rather than contractors in the living room, I think most landlords are completely hands off to the point where any repairs have to be fought tooth and nail for. Also, noise problems are especially common; many buildings are old-ish and there are few legal protections and absolutely no cultural respect for peace and quiet.
Can't speak for the US (and I imagine it varies by state anyway), but here in the UK it's the same legal situation in terms of access - reasonable notice required, landlord can only enter under...
Can't speak for the US (and I imagine it varies by state anyway), but here in the UK it's the same legal situation in terms of access - reasonable notice required, landlord can only enter under very specific circumstances, etc. etc. - but in reality few tenants know their rights and many landlords either don't know or don't care about the law. I've never known a rental property where the landlord or their agent didn't at least hold a key "just in case".
Thankfully lock cylinders are cheap and it only takes 10 minutes with a screw driver to swap one out, which is a quick and easy way to ensure your rights there are respected, but that's no help unless you know it's an option both practically and legally.
Texas uses a much more adversarial approach- rental units are required to have a lock on each exterior door that the landlord does not have the keys to, but this is almost always implemented as a...
Texas uses a much more adversarial approach- rental units are required to have a lock on each exterior door that the landlord does not have the keys to, but this is almost always implemented as a single-sided bolt which you can't lock when you're away from home (there's no keyhole on the outside).
So you can flip this bolt if you are home and don't have any roommates, but that's about it. The lease is written with language loose enough that they can basically make up any reason to let themselves in.
Using newly available data on housing that was collected after the Second World War by the United Nations, it is now possible to explore whether Britain’s housing supply issues began after 1980 with Right to Buy and a subsequent decline of council housebuilding, or whether it began shortly after the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was introduced.
This report uses this new data and other sources to compare British housebuilding and outcomes to that in Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, (West) Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland from 1955 to 2015. It finds that Britain’s housing shortage began at the beginning of the post-war period, not at its conclusion.
Housebuilding rates in England and Wales have dropped by more than a third after the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, from 2 per cent growth per year between 1856 and 1939 to 1.2 per cent between 1947 and 2019.
This has been a key factor behind the UK’s long-standing housing crisis, which has led to inflated property prices and soaring rents in recent decades.
That article seems to be arguing the opposite? The Towns and Country Planning Act basically established the same policies as the now infamous zoning regulations in the US, allowing local...
It would require a much more regulated market
That article seems to be arguing the opposite? The Towns and Country Planning Act basically established the same policies as the now infamous zoning regulations in the US, allowing local communities to restrict the types of development that can occur on land. The article argues that this additional regulation on land development severely restricted housing supply leading to high prices.
That article would argue that because it's written by a Tory. CFC claim to be independent but they're really not. I'm not saying that rich white Eton/Oxbridge kids whose daddies own half the home...
That article would argue that because it's written by a Tory. CFC claim to be independent but they're really not. I'm not saying that rich white Eton/Oxbridge kids whose daddies own half the home counties can't be centrists or even left wing, but y'know. They almost never are.
To be fair though, Breach is not entirely wrong. But planning is only part of the issue. Removing planning constraints completely would be insane, although they definitely need to streamline the process. But the legally imposed limits on local councils building housing are a significant problem which he glosses over almost entirely. State-built, social housing addresses a lot of the issues because it can't be bought up by private landlords and councils can rent it at affordable rates, which helps drive down rental and purchase prices for the private sector as well.
Look at this chart (from the Centre for Policy Studies, another "non-partisan" think tank who also blame planning regulations for the lack of the kind of social housing which their own data shows was being built between 1947 and 1980, immediately after TCPA) and notice what happens to the green line representing state housing projects when Right to Buy was brought in (RtB also included restrictions on councils building, as well as making them sell existing housing stock). If the state was building housing at the same rate now as they were pre-1980 the problem wouldn't be solved by any means, but it would be a hell of a lot less bad.
This report smells to me like the modern Tory strategy of blaming their current failures on previous governments, and while there is some truth in that in many situations because government is a long game, those reports are usually then just used as an excuse to explain the lack of action taking place right now. Clement Attlee did not cause the current housing crisis because no matter what TCPA might have done, there have been decades of Tory governments since then who have not fixed the problem either, or actively made things worse. And, to be fair, a few Labour ones as well, but it's been mostly conservatives in government since 1947.
To really underline it for people not familiar with the UK situation: the Right to Buy legislation totally undermines this by forcing local authorities to sell properties to their social tenants....
State-built, social housing addresses a lot of the issues because it can't be bought up by private landlords and councils can rent it at affordable rates, which helps drive down rental and purchase prices for the private sector as well.
To really underline it for people not familiar with the UK situation: the Right to Buy legislation totally undermines this by forcing local authorities to sell properties to their social tenants. There are some time-limited restrictions, but eventually it all just ends up on the open market to be bought up by whoever has the capital. And then about half of the government's £23 billion annual spending on Housing Benefit - enough to build 100,000 new homes per year - goes right back to private landlords.
Additional social housing could help in the short term, because it's fairly evident that there is insufficient supply, in the same way a command economy can function very well in times of crisis,...
Additional social housing could help in the short term, because it's fairly evident that there is insufficient supply, in the same way a command economy can function very well in times of crisis, but over the long term I'm not particularly convinced it's much of a long term solution. "Tory" governments are an inevitability of democracies - you're never going to have a system in which you never have incompetent governments. Over a long time horizon, this inevitably causes purely state run enterprises to go too far to one side or the other in supply.
Out of the developed economies, Japan has managed to have excellent housing outcomes by having taking power away from local governments with respect to zoning and broadly allowing far more development, and far more leeway in what they can develop, than practically every western country. The market did the rest.
Functionally, I also think this is much more reasonably achievable in either the UK or the US. I do not think there is much appetite for large government spending at the moment among the voting public, nor multi-year state developments, but loosening zoning regulations (and/or snatching away zoning power from local government) is both fairly easy and immediate from the government's point of view and relatively popular.
The spectre of these evil developers that would only make unaffordable housing seems quixotic to me. Let the building commence, then adjust if issues occur.
I'd liken it to Medicare/Medicaid in the US. The money's already being spent, because the government and population at large have collectively accepted that leaving that many people without...
I do not think there is much appetite for large government spending at the moment among the voting public, nor multi-year state developments
I'd liken it to Medicare/Medicaid in the US. The money's already being spent, because the government and population at large have collectively accepted that leaving that many people without housing (or healthcare) would be unacceptable, but a significant chunk of that public money is going to profiteering private entities. Even allowing for pretty significant inefficiencies and overruns it'd likely be more cost effective for the government to just do it themselves directly. It's not the whole solution, but as a cost-neutral reversal of a terrible existing policy it'd be a big step in the right direction.
I'd be on board with planning reform in principle and it may well also be an important part of the puzzle, but there's the catch-22 that any government I'd trust to make sensible reforms (rather than ones that heavily favour existing vested interests) is a government that I'd also trust to increase the social housing stock - and vice versa.
I wouldn't agree with the latter. I'd trust far more incompetent governments with loosening zoning regulations than I would in a massive social housing building project. The former just...
I wouldn't agree with the latter. I'd trust far more incompetent governments with loosening zoning regulations than I would in a massive social housing building project. The former just fundamentally has less moving parts, and less continual action. You'd have to trust the that throughout party flips, the government will budget and plan correctly for the enterprise, contract with competent contractors that aren't vampires, and be adaptable because nothing will ever go to plan. As compared to removing zoning powers in a mostly sensible way, when there are other nations that you can look at as an example.
The money's already being spent, because the government and population at large have collectively accepted that leaving that many people without housing (or healthcare) would be unacceptable, but a significant chunk of that public money is going to profiteering private entities
Honestly I feel like the US is becoming an unhelpful strawman for UK policy issues. Healthcare is a common one. There's a lot between NHS and the US healthcare system. It's actually fairly abnormal to have a fully socialized healthcare system like the NHS... and to be honest, it's not doing particularly well in either costs or outcomes compared to multipayer, mixed systems like you have in Japan or Germany. The best large scale healthcare systems right now benchmarked by outcomes and costs are multipayer, mixed market systems.
It's a shame that whenever a labour minister breathes the word "privatization" everyone goes instantly to "not the US!". Perhaps tories don't deserve the benefit of a doubt but this extreme dichotomization blows away nuanced solutions that work for other countries.
I wasn't meaning to bring healthcare (or even the US, really) into it specifically, more just trying to give a good US-audience-centric analogy of what's already happening right now on the ground....
I wasn't meaning to bring healthcare (or even the US, really) into it specifically, more just trying to give a good US-audience-centric analogy of what's already happening right now on the ground. UK housing, and US healthcare, are both spending vast amounts of public money as well as private, and doing so in a way that funnels a lot of that public spend directly into the private profit.
It's not necessarily the public/private split that's fundamentally at issue, but both the US healthcare system and the UK housing system are very similar examples of it being done in the wrong way here and now. In lieu of any other more sweeping reforms, the very first thing to do would be just take the huge amount of current expenditure and spend it more sensibly.
Oh, but there is. Over 60% of the UK public want state-owned energy generation, utilities, public transport and social care. It seems unlikely they wouldn't want to add housing to their list, but...
I do not think there is much appetite for large government spending at the moment among the voting public, nor multi-year state developments,
Oh, but there is. Over 60% of the UK public want state-owned energy generation, utilities, public transport and social care. It seems unlikely they wouldn't want to add housing to their list, but I've been wrong before so maybe.
What a proportion of people think they don't want is large scale government spending, because lots of people don't understand that state-level economies aren't credit cards. You don't have to "pay back" the money a government creates in order to spend it on large scale utility and infrastructure projects. It is the opposite, the money then goes into the economy and makes it work better for the majority of people. Countries, and the societies in them, benefit from state investment. They rarely benefit from the private sector strip-mining them for profit.
The spectre of these evil developers that would only make unaffordable housing seems quixotic to me
The private sector has literally being doing exactly that for the last 40 years. Why you would assume they'd suddenly stop being predatory profiteers just because it got marginally easier to get planning is baffling. They'll just do what they've always done, but more!
The private sector builds houses to make profit and for no other reason - developers invariably have to be forced by local authorities (the evil of planning departments, eh?) to construct 'affordable' housing because bigger houses have higher profit margins - and that is the wrong motive for something essential. Let the private sector duke it out over things that don't matter like shoes or hairbrushes by all means, but the essentials of life have been shown, consistently and over many sectors, to not be safe in their hands. Transport, healthcare, education, housing, water, energy, even the postal service - every time sectors like that get privatised, the outcomes for consumers get worse. I've lived through all of those things happening right here in the UK.
No, developers would definitely want profit in the end. The key is that you're unlocking supply, and thereby competition. When land that can be developed is incredibly scarce, and the housing...
No, developers would definitely want profit in the end. The key is that you're unlocking supply, and thereby competition. When land that can be developed is incredibly scarce, and the housing market is underserved in every demographic, then what land can be developed becomes very expensive, and it becomes most worthwhile for developers to target high margin customers.
But, in the end, there's a limit to how many high income renters there are. Inevitably, as that market becomes saturated, you make more money moving downmarket.
It'll never be about developers doing things out of the goodness of their heart.
but the essentials of life have been shown, consistently and over many sectors, to not be safe in their hands.
That's not really the case, though. I'd argue that for non-trivially populated nations, the countries with the best housing situations for its populace are Japan and Germany. Both did so with their rental stock mostly private, by doing a lot of building.
Germany is a juggernaut of adding apartments, rowhouses, and other homes. From 2010 to 2019, for every hundred people added to Germany’s population, the country gave permits for construction of 97 homes. That’s right: Germany permitted almost as many new homes as it added residents.
No reason you can't throw in regulations to tamper down on predatory edge cases where the power imbalance between a particular developer and a particular tenant, but in terms of price and price stabilization, lots of building is the proven solution.
The argument that capitalism will solve all the problems if only there was less regulation tends to fall apart when you look at what happens when you let capitalism off the regulatory leash....
The argument that capitalism will solve all the problems if only there was less regulation tends to fall apart when you look at what happens when you let capitalism off the regulatory leash. Developers could have built affordable housing at any point over the last two generations but chose not to. They're not going to magically start being good people now.
I think we agree that lots of building is what we need, I just don't think that lots of building for the profit of a tiny minority of already wealthy people is an effective way to achieve that. Why would anyone other than that rich minority want that?
To be honest, this seems like a very unfair representation of what I was saying. Regulations aren't born equal. Just because it's a regulation doesn't mean it's good. In particular, the...
To be honest, this seems like a very unfair representation of what I was saying.
Regulations aren't born equal. Just because it's a regulation doesn't mean it's good. In particular, the regulations that are at issue is building regulations that severely restrict the supply of land that can be developed, and causes an aberrant private housing market.
Developers could have built affordable housing at any point over the last two generations but chose not to.
Yes, because an artificially limited development market meant that excess capital in that market could not increase supply as it should, and as it does in other countries. No, developers are never going to build low cost housing out of the goodness of their hearts, the idea is create markets where they will build low cost housing because it makes them the most money.
Again, look at Japan and Germany. Their housing markets are not unregulated by any means, what's less regulated is their zoning and building permissiveness. Their private land market is such that most land is a depreciating asset (which is also why a majority of people rent in both countries). Developers there choose to build all kinds of housing - low income, high income, middle income, because it makes them the most money.
Tokyo in particular has no rent control, yet some of the lowest proportional rental costs in the world. Their low prices is from the massive supply of housing.
If you look at the chart I linked a few comments back, you'll see that despite the conservatives claims otherwise, the planning system is arguably not a major factor in restricting the rate of...
If you look at the chart I linked a few comments back, you'll see that despite the conservatives claims otherwise, the planning system is arguably not a major factor in restricting the rate of housebuilding. Before the Right to Buy legislation came in, housebuilding in the UK was actually pretty close to pre-TCPA levels. It certainly didn't drop off hard after 1947 as you might expect, the decline started later.When you factor in other post-war problems such as labour and supply shortages, the post-war building rate is possibly even higher than it would have been beforehand. The majority of post-TCPA, pre-RTB building was done by the public sector. If you drive 5 miles from my house in any direction you'll go past multiple, large scale, housing developments going up now, and on the way you'll drive past ones which have gone up in the last 15 years. Planning is clearly not getting in the builders way too much. They're all relatively big, expensive houses that are ugly, boring and built like crap.
My issue with relying on the private sector to provide housing has several aspects. Firstly, I feel that essential services should never exist for profit. Some investor shouldn't get richer because people need shelter, that's morally repugnant to me. Also historically that has never gone well. I refer you again to basically all the privatisation in the UK over the last 40+ years. Profit and services are simply not capable of co-existing. It's one or the other. Perhaps in other countries it works but we're not talking about other counties.
Secondly, the private sector won't do a good job for the consumers, because their interest is profit. My house was built by my local council over 70 years ago and is better built and in better condition today than most new builds going up today. Councils usually build for longevity and quality because their motive is good housing that will last a good amount of time - because they operate on long term planning, not short term profit. Short term profit is a terrible motivator to make something good quality. Additionally, modern housing development, which I see almost everywhere I go at the moment, is still just piling bricks on top of each other in mostly cube-shapes, jammed in as closely as possible on the space available. That is what the accountants say makes the most profit, so that's what they do. But that's a terrible way to build houses if you have requirements other than making the most possible profit.
My local council won the freakin' Stirling prize for the last houses they built, which are architecturally interesting and energy effecient - the sort of building that the private sector just never cares about. Architecture matters. Architecture is vitally important for building communities. Using new building techniques matters, the UK especially has a huge problem with thermally inefficient housing and while old building techniques might be profitable in the short term for the developers, but it's costly in the long run for the house owners and for the environment as a whole.
Why can't councils just build the houses we need? It's by far the most efficient way, long term, to create places for people to live. We don't have to wait for the higher end of the market to get saturated so the developers give a shit about making more affordable homes (assuming that will ever happen, because just loading people up with even more debt seems to be working for the developers so far) - we can build them right now. Plus nobody gets rich off people needing somewhere to live. Bonus.
I'm not really sure that tracks with me. Is the implication that anglo-saxons are incapable of managing market economies? That doesn't seem to make sense. It's certainly possible that post WW2...
Profit and services are simply not capable of co-existing. It's one or the other. Perhaps in other countries it works but we're not talking about other counties.
I'm not really sure that tracks with me. Is the implication that anglo-saxons are incapable of managing market economies? That doesn't seem to make sense.
It's certainly possible that post WW2 Britain had mostly public land development, but that's to a large degree an artifact of the command economy both during the war and in the aftermath, it's not a particularly sustainable economic model, at least in historical examples.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree, the last 3 iterations of this conversation have basically been spinning wheels. In the end, based on successes historically and currently, the best housing (an healthcare for that matter) outcomes over a long period of time by developed nations has been well managed private markets. I think there's plenty enough examples from the Tigers and other European countries that private development can produce lovely places to exist in (because that's what people want, and people spend money on what they want).
Not only that, but it's honestly a much more realistic policy outcome? Can you honest to god see a UK government anytime soon implement a mass public housing program, let alone do it well? Certainly not Sunak, and I find it highly doubtful Starmer's labour would even attempt it. Loosening zoning regulations, both on a local level, and on a national level, is a much smaller step for the government to take. It would even have dueling financial interests - existing developers and SFH residents would not want to see zoning loosened, but other developers would be eager to get their chunk of the pie.
I mean, yeah. That does seem to be the case. Look at the evidence. The UK government privatised many essential services and every single one of them is now worse at providing that service now than...
I'm not really sure that tracks with me. Is the implication that anglo-saxons are incapable of managing market economies? That doesn't seem to make sense.
I mean, yeah. That does seem to be the case. Look at the evidence. The UK government privatised many essential services and every single one of them is now worse at providing that service now than it was when under public ownership. America's healthcare and higher education system was private from the start and is an utter shitshow. They're all making shedloads of money for already rich people, but they're not providing the service they would be if they were being run to be useful rather than profitable. Services are fundamentally not businesses, they have different goals and different requirements. This seems to be a thing that freemarketeers just can't grasp and I don't know why.
I don't know how Germany or Japan makes it work. But it doesn't seem to here, and it doesn't seem to in the US either.
The private sector is amazing at making cheap consumer goods for things that don't matter. For things people can choose not to have. It is dreadful at running services which either should not (housing, education, healthcare), or cannot (public transport) make money. Housing is a public service. Affordable houses have the lowest profit margins, so the private sector will wait to build them as long as possible and when it finally (if ever) reaches the point of the market where it has to do that to squeeze the last few pennies out of people who just want somewhere to live, it will build those houses as cheap as possible - which means low quality, leaky homes that cost more money to live in than they should.
As for the most realistic real-world solution? I don't know. The conservatives won't do anything, they rely too much on rural voters who don't want new housing near them; and the industry which is making money off housing being so expensive - developers, lenders and landlords too - has long been in bed with Rishi and his ilk too. Corbyn's Labour might have done something, Starmer I am less confident about but Labour will certainly ensure local councils have more funding available, which some at least would like to spend on housing (I know my local council would). Planning reform would be nice but it's been talked about for a long time and nobody has done anything.
I am honestly starting to think that the only way to actually have things change on a timescale useful to people alive right now is by violent revolution and that has many of it's own problems too, obviously. I am not, quite, yet, advocating that.
It's just like any other a market, there isn't infinite ability or desire for people to invest in real estate. In a magical world where we could will houses into existence investors would find...
It's just like any other a market, there isn't infinite ability or desire for people to invest in real estate. In a magical world where we could will houses into existence investors would find pretty quickly that they're holding some expensive bags.
If new builds are supply constrained and can't meet demand because of zoning/NIMBYism/labour or whatever then of course prices will be high but if we can actually build to meet or exceed demand the problem will solve itself.
Ooof, this hits a little too close to home. My first big boy job in the city was in 2013 so this maps pretty perfectly to my own experience. I have a funny anecdote about our own rent issues where...
Ooof, this hits a little too close to home. My first big boy job in the city was in 2013 so this maps pretty perfectly to my own experience.
I have a funny anecdote about our own rent issues where my partner and I live. We live in a small town with 8000 homes nearly 2 hours from the next big city. There is very little industry (outside of biology and tourism), so there aren't many ways to make a substantial salary. During Covid, advertised rents nearly doubled. We assumed it was an artifact of the buying spree of 2021/2022 and new property owners trying to cover their mortgages. In some cases, there were 1 bedroom/1 bath houses sitting for rent on Zillow for $5,500 a month. None of us could believe it. As a result, our landlord raised the rent substantially. As did the landlord of many of our renting friends.
About a month ago I was appointed to our town's planning commission and started digging into all of the components that could effect rents for an upcoming general plan rewrite. To prep for this I had coffees with anyone who actually worked for the city to try and understand how we could actually be helpful. During one of those meetings, I found out that one of the biggest drivers for these hikes was the implementation of a ban on short term rentals in, of course, 2021. I learned the way folks were getting around it was to advertise the home at a high monthly rate and then rent pro-rated months at the fraction of the full month. If you had a bungalow going for $8000 a month (which no resident is actually going to pay), they would rent it for a pro-rated month (i.e. a week) and the rate of $2000 dollars. They stayed in compliance and could still rent short term. The city is aware of the issue and looking for a solution (our city staff are awesome!) but the damage is kind of done. Land lords now think those are resonable rents and for those of us who live, work, and have set roots down in the town we'll likely have to eat those extra costs. On my darker days I wish we still had "the stocks" so we could publicly shame these land lords. But who am I kidding, the landed class would never end up there anyway.
Are they? When I saw the stats for Australia, the vast majority of property investors owned less than 3 properties. You have the government and society telling you that you need to save for your...
Sure, you get some 'mum and dad' landlords who are kinder and don't raise the rent as much as others or own more than a few houses, but they are the outliers
Are they? When I saw the stats for Australia, the vast majority of property investors owned less than 3 properties. You have the government and society telling you that you need to save for your retirement because the government won’t help you beyond the bare minimum, and the safest way to invest in your retirement is property.
It’s entirely unsurprising that people feel threatened when their retirement funds are at risk.
Yeah, we really need to fix this. We have commodified property that maximizes returns rather than actual use. There are lots of mechanisms for financial returns - food, housing, and healthcare...
the safest way to invest in your retirement is property.
Yeah, we really need to fix this. We have commodified property that maximizes returns rather than actual use. There are lots of mechanisms for financial returns - food, housing, and healthcare should not be among them.
An article both amusing and depressing, about the state of renting in London. I have no doubt that this does not apply solely to London, or even the UK, but I enjoyed the read (even if it far too...
An article both amusing and depressing, about the state of renting in London. I have no doubt that this does not apply solely to London, or even the UK, but I enjoyed the read (even if it far too accurately described my own situation of renting 200 miles north of London).
While we’re all sharing shitty landlord stories, I’ll throw mine on the pile. I’m across the pond, but this article still resonated with me.
In my current area, there is not a lot of apartment housing. Most places have waitlists, and you pay through the nose for some truly crappy lodgings.
My husband and I lived in a 900 sq. ft, no frills, badly-put-together apartment.
Before our lease came up for renewal, the property company sent us notice that our rent would be going up by 20%, to well above $2000 per month. (At the time, this was very high, but it also looks kind of quaint by post-COVID renting standards).
Seeing this, we went “oh SHIT” and ended up drastically accelerating our home-buying timeline, which we hadn’t even started at that point. We ended up finding a house, but wouldn’t be able to close before our lease was up.
We only needed an extra month though, so, immediately after signing a new month-to-month lease with the apartment, I notified the property manager that we would be moving out in 30 days (effectively staying only one month of our month-to-month lease).
I was taken aback when he told me, flat out, “you cannot do that.”
I said that I absolutely could.
Meanwhile, he fished around in my paperwork and then swore. He then told me a page was “missing” from what he had me sign. On that page was language that we would have had to have given THREE months’ notice, even on a month-to-month lease.
The guy flat out admitted this to me, and I’m still not sure why. It’s super scummy. I wouldn’t have ever signed something like that in the first place, but they no doubt rely on people not reading the pages of legalese closely and trapping people with that gotcha.
He had to accept our 30 day notice, but he was very clearly not happy about it. He didn’t even try to keep up the pretense of politeness with me. He was openly angry with me because he wasn’t able to screw me over.
The mortgage payment on the house we got was over $600 lower than our rent. We later refinanced into a 20-year loan instead of our original 30, and our payments are STILL less than we would have been paying in rent there.
I was talking with a substitute teacher at my school the other day who is in his 70s. He mentioned that he and his wife were living in that same apartment complex, and I told him to be careful because they raised the rent on us so sharply. Turns out they had already done the same thing to him. He actually broke down, almost in tears, talking about how he didn’t know what he was going to do.
There’s nowhere for them to move to; they can’t buy a house at their age and on a fixed income; and they are trying to stay afloat on medical payments. The fact that he’s substitute teaching in his 70s when he should be relaxing and enjoying retirement means that they are hurting for money, and this predatory property company is bleeding them dry — just like they tried to do to us.
The worst part is, when I look up the property company, it’s huge. They have many multi-million dollar properties. Apartments, hotels, and the kind of mega mansions the Kardashians would own or vacation in. The company clearly doesn’t need to be so vampiric with its tenants, but, then again, doing that is probably what enabled them to have such a portfolio in the first place.
It just kind of hurts to know that they’re monetarily rewarded for such antisocial behavior.
I have no doubt that hundreds of tenants in that one complex alone have fallen prey to the rent raise trap and the three month notice bullshit. And those are only the two scummy practices I know about. I’m sure there’s far more behind the curtain that I’m not aware of. Also, when I scale those practices up, beyond just my one complex to their entire property portfolio, it makes me shudder.
I didn’t see that article. Thanks for sharing. It hits close to home.
For my first ten years of teaching I was in high cost of living areas, teaching in low-income schools, and making a salary that only allowed me to barely squeak by. I specifically moved to a higher-income area with better teacher salaries because I was tired of making pennies.
This reminds me of my current landlord in the US:
I rented the unit and moved in, surprised to see that there was no door to the bedroom and no door to the bathroom. There is a door into the area that locks, but I can look myself in the bathroom mirror from my bedroom. When I asked about it, they condescendingly told me "it's an ensuite, this is normal," even though the floorplan marked these doors.
The door to the w/d doesn't close either, and is inside my ensuite. The w/d is the cheapest stackable GE unit available and is extremely loud (my apple watch has told me off for being in a loud space without hearing protection when standing next to it). So the door itself is a non-functioning nuisance.
The landlord lets themselves and their contractors in whenever they please. I used to work from home all the time, and was on a call only to get a notification from my smart lock that the front door was unlocked. I stepped away, only to find 3 contract electricians in my living room, with keys to my unit, unescorted by the landlord.
Oh, they also make me replace my own AC filter quarterly, under threat of a $45 fine if they notice I didn't do it. I have yet to find another property where this is a thing, but they swear up and down that this is normal behavior.
In Portugal the landlord doesn't have the keys to a property rented to someone else (unless the tenant specifically wants them to). They can request an "inspection" of the property, but it has to be scheduled in advance and the tenant has to let them in. In the event of non payment / breach of contract the landlord can call a locksmith to try to get inside and remove the tenant, but otherwise I believe this behavior would be trespassing.
Not to say our housing market is anything to be proud of. It's pretty bad, especially in Lisbon, and most landlords are pretty terrible AFAIK. Rather than contractors in the living room, I think most landlords are completely hands off to the point where any repairs have to be fought tooth and nail for. Also, noise problems are especially common; many buildings are old-ish and there are few legal protections and absolutely no cultural respect for peace and quiet.
Can't speak for the US (and I imagine it varies by state anyway), but here in the UK it's the same legal situation in terms of access - reasonable notice required, landlord can only enter under very specific circumstances, etc. etc. - but in reality few tenants know their rights and many landlords either don't know or don't care about the law. I've never known a rental property where the landlord or their agent didn't at least hold a key "just in case".
Thankfully lock cylinders are cheap and it only takes 10 minutes with a screw driver to swap one out, which is a quick and easy way to ensure your rights there are respected, but that's no help unless you know it's an option both practically and legally.
Texas uses a much more adversarial approach- rental units are required to have a lock on each exterior door that the landlord does not have the keys to, but this is almost always implemented as a single-sided bolt which you can't lock when you're away from home (there's no keyhole on the outside).
So you can flip this bolt if you are home and don't have any roommates, but that's about it. The lease is written with language loose enough that they can basically make up any reason to let themselves in.
Here's a report about structural reasons why housing very expensive in the UK:
The housebuilding crisis: The UK’s 4 million missing homes
That article seems to be arguing the opposite? The Towns and Country Planning Act basically established the same policies as the now infamous zoning regulations in the US, allowing local communities to restrict the types of development that can occur on land. The article argues that this additional regulation on land development severely restricted housing supply leading to high prices.
That article would argue that because it's written by a Tory. CFC claim to be independent but they're really not. I'm not saying that rich white Eton/Oxbridge kids whose daddies own half the home counties can't be centrists or even left wing, but y'know. They almost never are.
To be fair though, Breach is not entirely wrong. But planning is only part of the issue. Removing planning constraints completely would be insane, although they definitely need to streamline the process. But the legally imposed limits on local councils building housing are a significant problem which he glosses over almost entirely. State-built, social housing addresses a lot of the issues because it can't be bought up by private landlords and councils can rent it at affordable rates, which helps drive down rental and purchase prices for the private sector as well.
Look at this chart (from the Centre for Policy Studies, another "non-partisan" think tank who also blame planning regulations for the lack of the kind of social housing which their own data shows was being built between 1947 and 1980, immediately after TCPA) and notice what happens to the green line representing state housing projects when Right to Buy was brought in (RtB also included restrictions on councils building, as well as making them sell existing housing stock). If the state was building housing at the same rate now as they were pre-1980 the problem wouldn't be solved by any means, but it would be a hell of a lot less bad.
This report smells to me like the modern Tory strategy of blaming their current failures on previous governments, and while there is some truth in that in many situations because government is a long game, those reports are usually then just used as an excuse to explain the lack of action taking place right now. Clement Attlee did not cause the current housing crisis because no matter what TCPA might have done, there have been decades of Tory governments since then who have not fixed the problem either, or actively made things worse. And, to be fair, a few Labour ones as well, but it's been mostly conservatives in government since 1947.
To really underline it for people not familiar with the UK situation: the Right to Buy legislation totally undermines this by forcing local authorities to sell properties to their social tenants. There are some time-limited restrictions, but eventually it all just ends up on the open market to be bought up by whoever has the capital. And then about half of the government's £23 billion annual spending on Housing Benefit - enough to build 100,000 new homes per year - goes right back to private landlords.
Additional social housing could help in the short term, because it's fairly evident that there is insufficient supply, in the same way a command economy can function very well in times of crisis, but over the long term I'm not particularly convinced it's much of a long term solution. "Tory" governments are an inevitability of democracies - you're never going to have a system in which you never have incompetent governments. Over a long time horizon, this inevitably causes purely state run enterprises to go too far to one side or the other in supply.
Out of the developed economies, Japan has managed to have excellent housing outcomes by having taking power away from local governments with respect to zoning and broadly allowing far more development, and far more leeway in what they can develop, than practically every western country. The market did the rest.
Functionally, I also think this is much more reasonably achievable in either the UK or the US. I do not think there is much appetite for large government spending at the moment among the voting public, nor multi-year state developments, but loosening zoning regulations (and/or snatching away zoning power from local government) is both fairly easy and immediate from the government's point of view and relatively popular.
The spectre of these evil developers that would only make unaffordable housing seems quixotic to me. Let the building commence, then adjust if issues occur.
I'd liken it to Medicare/Medicaid in the US. The money's already being spent, because the government and population at large have collectively accepted that leaving that many people without housing (or healthcare) would be unacceptable, but a significant chunk of that public money is going to profiteering private entities. Even allowing for pretty significant inefficiencies and overruns it'd likely be more cost effective for the government to just do it themselves directly. It's not the whole solution, but as a cost-neutral reversal of a terrible existing policy it'd be a big step in the right direction.
I'd be on board with planning reform in principle and it may well also be an important part of the puzzle, but there's the catch-22 that any government I'd trust to make sensible reforms (rather than ones that heavily favour existing vested interests) is a government that I'd also trust to increase the social housing stock - and vice versa.
I wouldn't agree with the latter. I'd trust far more incompetent governments with loosening zoning regulations than I would in a massive social housing building project. The former just fundamentally has less moving parts, and less continual action. You'd have to trust the that throughout party flips, the government will budget and plan correctly for the enterprise, contract with competent contractors that aren't vampires, and be adaptable because nothing will ever go to plan. As compared to removing zoning powers in a mostly sensible way, when there are other nations that you can look at as an example.
Honestly I feel like the US is becoming an unhelpful strawman for UK policy issues. Healthcare is a common one. There's a lot between NHS and the US healthcare system. It's actually fairly abnormal to have a fully socialized healthcare system like the NHS... and to be honest, it's not doing particularly well in either costs or outcomes compared to multipayer, mixed systems like you have in Japan or Germany. The best large scale healthcare systems right now benchmarked by outcomes and costs are multipayer, mixed market systems.
It's a shame that whenever a labour minister breathes the word "privatization" everyone goes instantly to "not the US!". Perhaps tories don't deserve the benefit of a doubt but this extreme dichotomization blows away nuanced solutions that work for other countries.
I wasn't meaning to bring healthcare (or even the US, really) into it specifically, more just trying to give a good US-audience-centric analogy of what's already happening right now on the ground. UK housing, and US healthcare, are both spending vast amounts of public money as well as private, and doing so in a way that funnels a lot of that public spend directly into the private profit.
It's not necessarily the public/private split that's fundamentally at issue, but both the US healthcare system and the UK housing system are very similar examples of it being done in the wrong way here and now. In lieu of any other more sweeping reforms, the very first thing to do would be just take the huge amount of current expenditure and spend it more sensibly.
Oh, but there is. Over 60% of the UK public want state-owned energy generation, utilities, public transport and social care. It seems unlikely they wouldn't want to add housing to their list, but I've been wrong before so maybe.
What a proportion of people think they don't want is large scale government spending, because lots of people don't understand that state-level economies aren't credit cards. You don't have to "pay back" the money a government creates in order to spend it on large scale utility and infrastructure projects. It is the opposite, the money then goes into the economy and makes it work better for the majority of people. Countries, and the societies in them, benefit from state investment. They rarely benefit from the private sector strip-mining them for profit.
The private sector has literally being doing exactly that for the last 40 years. Why you would assume they'd suddenly stop being predatory profiteers just because it got marginally easier to get planning is baffling. They'll just do what they've always done, but more!
The private sector builds houses to make profit and for no other reason - developers invariably have to be forced by local authorities (the evil of planning departments, eh?) to construct 'affordable' housing because bigger houses have higher profit margins - and that is the wrong motive for something essential. Let the private sector duke it out over things that don't matter like shoes or hairbrushes by all means, but the essentials of life have been shown, consistently and over many sectors, to not be safe in their hands. Transport, healthcare, education, housing, water, energy, even the postal service - every time sectors like that get privatised, the outcomes for consumers get worse. I've lived through all of those things happening right here in the UK.
No, developers would definitely want profit in the end. The key is that you're unlocking supply, and thereby competition. When land that can be developed is incredibly scarce, and the housing market is underserved in every demographic, then what land can be developed becomes very expensive, and it becomes most worthwhile for developers to target high margin customers.
But, in the end, there's a limit to how many high income renters there are. Inevitably, as that market becomes saturated, you make more money moving downmarket.
It'll never be about developers doing things out of the goodness of their heart.
That's not really the case, though. I'd argue that for non-trivially populated nations, the countries with the best housing situations for its populace are Japan and Germany. Both did so with their rental stock mostly private, by doing a lot of building.
No reason you can't throw in regulations to tamper down on predatory edge cases where the power imbalance between a particular developer and a particular tenant, but in terms of price and price stabilization, lots of building is the proven solution.
The argument that capitalism will solve all the problems if only there was less regulation tends to fall apart when you look at what happens when you let capitalism off the regulatory leash. Developers could have built affordable housing at any point over the last two generations but chose not to. They're not going to magically start being good people now.
I think we agree that lots of building is what we need, I just don't think that lots of building for the profit of a tiny minority of already wealthy people is an effective way to achieve that. Why would anyone other than that rich minority want that?
To be honest, this seems like a very unfair representation of what I was saying.
Regulations aren't born equal. Just because it's a regulation doesn't mean it's good. In particular, the regulations that are at issue is building regulations that severely restrict the supply of land that can be developed, and causes an aberrant private housing market.
Yes, because an artificially limited development market meant that excess capital in that market could not increase supply as it should, and as it does in other countries. No, developers are never going to build low cost housing out of the goodness of their hearts, the idea is create markets where they will build low cost housing because it makes them the most money.
Again, look at Japan and Germany. Their housing markets are not unregulated by any means, what's less regulated is their zoning and building permissiveness. Their private land market is such that most land is a depreciating asset (which is also why a majority of people rent in both countries). Developers there choose to build all kinds of housing - low income, high income, middle income, because it makes them the most money.
Tokyo in particular has no rent control, yet some of the lowest proportional rental costs in the world. Their low prices is from the massive supply of housing.
If you look at the chart I linked a few comments back, you'll see that despite the conservatives claims otherwise, the planning system is arguably not a major factor in restricting the rate of housebuilding. Before the Right to Buy legislation came in, housebuilding in the UK was actually pretty close to pre-TCPA levels. It certainly didn't drop off hard after 1947 as you might expect, the decline started later.When you factor in other post-war problems such as labour and supply shortages, the post-war building rate is possibly even higher than it would have been beforehand. The majority of post-TCPA, pre-RTB building was done by the public sector. If you drive 5 miles from my house in any direction you'll go past multiple, large scale, housing developments going up now, and on the way you'll drive past ones which have gone up in the last 15 years. Planning is clearly not getting in the builders way too much. They're all relatively big, expensive houses that are ugly, boring and built like crap.
My issue with relying on the private sector to provide housing has several aspects. Firstly, I feel that essential services should never exist for profit. Some investor shouldn't get richer because people need shelter, that's morally repugnant to me. Also historically that has never gone well. I refer you again to basically all the privatisation in the UK over the last 40+ years. Profit and services are simply not capable of co-existing. It's one or the other. Perhaps in other countries it works but we're not talking about other counties.
Secondly, the private sector won't do a good job for the consumers, because their interest is profit. My house was built by my local council over 70 years ago and is better built and in better condition today than most new builds going up today. Councils usually build for longevity and quality because their motive is good housing that will last a good amount of time - because they operate on long term planning, not short term profit. Short term profit is a terrible motivator to make something good quality. Additionally, modern housing development, which I see almost everywhere I go at the moment, is still just piling bricks on top of each other in mostly cube-shapes, jammed in as closely as possible on the space available. That is what the accountants say makes the most profit, so that's what they do. But that's a terrible way to build houses if you have requirements other than making the most possible profit.
My local council won the freakin' Stirling prize for the last houses they built, which are architecturally interesting and energy effecient - the sort of building that the private sector just never cares about. Architecture matters. Architecture is vitally important for building communities. Using new building techniques matters, the UK especially has a huge problem with thermally inefficient housing and while old building techniques might be profitable in the short term for the developers, but it's costly in the long run for the house owners and for the environment as a whole.
Why can't councils just build the houses we need? It's by far the most efficient way, long term, to create places for people to live. We don't have to wait for the higher end of the market to get saturated so the developers give a shit about making more affordable homes (assuming that will ever happen, because just loading people up with even more debt seems to be working for the developers so far) - we can build them right now. Plus nobody gets rich off people needing somewhere to live. Bonus.
I'm not really sure that tracks with me. Is the implication that anglo-saxons are incapable of managing market economies? That doesn't seem to make sense.
It's certainly possible that post WW2 Britain had mostly public land development, but that's to a large degree an artifact of the command economy both during the war and in the aftermath, it's not a particularly sustainable economic model, at least in historical examples.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree, the last 3 iterations of this conversation have basically been spinning wheels. In the end, based on successes historically and currently, the best housing (an healthcare for that matter) outcomes over a long period of time by developed nations has been well managed private markets. I think there's plenty enough examples from the Tigers and other European countries that private development can produce lovely places to exist in (because that's what people want, and people spend money on what they want).
Not only that, but it's honestly a much more realistic policy outcome? Can you honest to god see a UK government anytime soon implement a mass public housing program, let alone do it well? Certainly not Sunak, and I find it highly doubtful Starmer's labour would even attempt it. Loosening zoning regulations, both on a local level, and on a national level, is a much smaller step for the government to take. It would even have dueling financial interests - existing developers and SFH residents would not want to see zoning loosened, but other developers would be eager to get their chunk of the pie.
I mean, yeah. That does seem to be the case. Look at the evidence. The UK government privatised many essential services and every single one of them is now worse at providing that service now than it was when under public ownership. America's healthcare and higher education system was private from the start and is an utter shitshow. They're all making shedloads of money for already rich people, but they're not providing the service they would be if they were being run to be useful rather than profitable. Services are fundamentally not businesses, they have different goals and different requirements. This seems to be a thing that freemarketeers just can't grasp and I don't know why.
I don't know how Germany or Japan makes it work. But it doesn't seem to here, and it doesn't seem to in the US either.
The private sector is amazing at making cheap consumer goods for things that don't matter. For things people can choose not to have. It is dreadful at running services which either should not (housing, education, healthcare), or cannot (public transport) make money. Housing is a public service. Affordable houses have the lowest profit margins, so the private sector will wait to build them as long as possible and when it finally (if ever) reaches the point of the market where it has to do that to squeeze the last few pennies out of people who just want somewhere to live, it will build those houses as cheap as possible - which means low quality, leaky homes that cost more money to live in than they should.
As for the most realistic real-world solution? I don't know. The conservatives won't do anything, they rely too much on rural voters who don't want new housing near them; and the industry which is making money off housing being so expensive - developers, lenders and landlords too - has long been in bed with Rishi and his ilk too. Corbyn's Labour might have done something, Starmer I am less confident about but Labour will certainly ensure local councils have more funding available, which some at least would like to spend on housing (I know my local council would). Planning reform would be nice but it's been talked about for a long time and nobody has done anything.
I am honestly starting to think that the only way to actually have things change on a timescale useful to people alive right now is by violent revolution and that has many of it's own problems too, obviously. I am not, quite, yet, advocating that.
It's just like any other a market, there isn't infinite ability or desire for people to invest in real estate. In a magical world where we could will houses into existence investors would find pretty quickly that they're holding some expensive bags.
If new builds are supply constrained and can't meet demand because of zoning/NIMBYism/labour or whatever then of course prices will be high but if we can actually build to meet or exceed demand the problem will solve itself.
Ooof, this hits a little too close to home. My first big boy job in the city was in 2013 so this maps pretty perfectly to my own experience.
I have a funny anecdote about our own rent issues where my partner and I live. We live in a small town with 8000 homes nearly 2 hours from the next big city. There is very little industry (outside of biology and tourism), so there aren't many ways to make a substantial salary. During Covid, advertised rents nearly doubled. We assumed it was an artifact of the buying spree of 2021/2022 and new property owners trying to cover their mortgages. In some cases, there were 1 bedroom/1 bath houses sitting for rent on Zillow for $5,500 a month. None of us could believe it. As a result, our landlord raised the rent substantially. As did the landlord of many of our renting friends.
About a month ago I was appointed to our town's planning commission and started digging into all of the components that could effect rents for an upcoming general plan rewrite. To prep for this I had coffees with anyone who actually worked for the city to try and understand how we could actually be helpful. During one of those meetings, I found out that one of the biggest drivers for these hikes was the implementation of a ban on short term rentals in, of course, 2021. I learned the way folks were getting around it was to advertise the home at a high monthly rate and then rent pro-rated months at the fraction of the full month. If you had a bungalow going for $8000 a month (which no resident is actually going to pay), they would rent it for a pro-rated month (i.e. a week) and the rate of $2000 dollars. They stayed in compliance and could still rent short term. The city is aware of the issue and looking for a solution (our city staff are awesome!) but the damage is kind of done. Land lords now think those are resonable rents and for those of us who live, work, and have set roots down in the town we'll likely have to eat those extra costs. On my darker days I wish we still had "the stocks" so we could publicly shame these land lords. But who am I kidding, the landed class would never end up there anyway.
Are they? When I saw the stats for Australia, the vast majority of property investors owned less than 3 properties. You have the government and society telling you that you need to save for your retirement because the government won’t help you beyond the bare minimum, and the safest way to invest in your retirement is property.
It’s entirely unsurprising that people feel threatened when their retirement funds are at risk.
Yeah, we really need to fix this. We have commodified property that maximizes returns rather than actual use. There are lots of mechanisms for financial returns - food, housing, and healthcare should not be among them.
An article both amusing and depressing, about the state of renting in London. I have no doubt that this does not apply solely to London, or even the UK, but I enjoyed the read (even if it far too accurately described my own situation of renting 200 miles north of London).
Very well written, shocking, enraging, and made me want to kill as well.