Recently I compiled a 69 step guide to getting on the “property ladder” which – to save you clicking and reading – could be neatly boiled down to the following points: have a lot of savings, have a lot of income or suffer a massive bereavement. Ideally a combination of all three.I realise now that a glib rundown of just 69 of the myriad forces that make the UK’s housing system so exclusionary to the average unpropertied young person may have resulted in dejection, despondency and perhaps even degeneracy among the VICE readership. You don’t want to resign yourself to eternal landlords until you’re evicted off the mortal coil. You want solutions!
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Consider this the paracetamol to the previous article’s self-destructive sambuca shot. Here is a thorough and complete guide to fixing the UK’s housing crisis.“Other than finding a rich partner to buy with, the most prudent thing might be campaigning for systemic change,” says Simon Youel, the head of policy and advocacy at Positive Money.Mathew Lawrence, founder of think tank Common Wealth, independently alights on the same solution: “The problem for the individual is, clearly, these problems are pretty structural and ingrained, and therefore need a political-economic intervention, at a systemic level. But, you know, one person can't do that on their own. So that can't really be your advice.”Can’t it? Lawrence is clearly well versed in his economic and political analysis, but he underestimates the average reader of VICE UK and your ability to affect massive systemic change at his peril! So what aspects of The System do you need to change, should you find yourself in a position to change it?“The challenge is that housing has proven the best investment that the majority of people can make since the early 70s,” says Neal Hudson, a housing market analyst at Residential Analysts. “The fact that you can take a leveraged punt on an asset that also works as your home at the same time, has a certain amount of enforced savings, and the tax benefits are massive, the alternatives are crap. While all of that remains in place, it's what people are going to want to do.”The more prohibitively expensive housing becomes, the better investment it is. And the better investment it is, the more prohibitively expensive it becomes, etc. It surely follows that one way of making housing more affordable would be to break this infinite feedback loop, and make property a worse investment. But how?
CHANGE THE SYSTEM
MAKE PROPERTY A BAD INVESTMENT
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BUILD MORE HOUSES
PENALISE SPECULATION
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OCCUPY EMPTY RESIDENCES
BUILD NON-MARKET HOUSING
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BUILD NON-MARKET HOUSING FOR NEW TENANTS
EXPAND EXISTING COUNCIL HOUSING
BUILD A WHOLE NEW TOWN
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“I'm not saying that is the answer, but it might be an answer.”It’s time for some new New Towns for the Youth: Millennial Keynes, Gen Ztevenage. As Dan Wilson Craw of Generation Rent, an advocacy group for private renters, tells me: “Homeownership does mean that you will reach retirement without housing costs to worry about, but more immediately you escape a housing situation where you’re at the whim of your landlord.” It begs the question: How much do people want to be homeowners, and how much do they just really hate their landlords?The fact that a property can become a lucrative source of income through rent itself increases its value as an asset. Ergo, fewer people can become homeowners and more people are forced to rent. Ergo, rents can be increased, because the alternative is homelessness. Ergo, the value of the asset increases. Another hellish cycle, which could be quite simply ended by making landlordism illegal.Unless the Conservative Party of Great Britain goes rogue and uncharacteristically decides to abolish landlordism tomorrow, people will still be renting, and their treatment is intertwined with the housing market. “It's not the right focus to always push people into buying,” argues Gustafsson of the Resolution Foundation. “Because we also need to make sure that the people who are relying on the private rented sector also have a decent quality of living.”
ABOLISH LANDLORDISM
MAKE RENTING TOLERABLE (?) AGAIN (?)
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As Hatherley tells me, in many, many other countries, the private rented sector is not that big of an issue. “The central problem is not really private renting as such, not really owner occupancy at such, but the fact that the rights of renters are weaker than any other European country.”“Things like short-hold tenancies; the apparently soon-to-be-ended (but we'll see about that) ‘no-fault’ evictions; the enormous levels of inflation; the lack of rent control; the fact that landlord regulation is still something in its infancy, with the government trying their best to stamp on it; all means that renting is just uniquely shit.”Wilson Craw of Generation Rent argues that for young people who move to cities like London, “it’s normally because that’s the only place you can pursue your chosen career or you have a support network. Either way, you have no choice but to pay high rents that suck up 40 percent or more of your income… That leaves very little to save. The Affordable Housing Commission says you shouldn’t need to pay more than a third of your income for a decent home”.A 2018 study by Santander Mortgages found that mortgage repayments were cheaper than rent payments in every part of the UK, with homeowners saving on average £2,268 per year (£3,500 in London) compared to tenants.
BRING IN RENT CONTROLS
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But in order to buy, you’ll need a deposit, something which is significantly easier to accrue for people with lower costs-to-incomes, for instance: homeowners. People “on the ladder” are therefore able to save at a quicker rate than tenants, skewing the market in their favour. “Ultimately rents need to fall substantially so that we can all save for the future, whether we want to buy a house or not,” says Wilson Craw.“Right now a law called Section 21 means landlords can evict you without needing a reason,” says Wilson Craw. Legally, the place you live in is not your home, because it belongs to someone else, and the precariousness of this dynamic, he argues, “creates the enormous uncertainty that drives our desire for a home we own”.“Following a campaign by Generation Rent and renter unions, the government agreed to abolish Section 21 and bring in more secure tenancies – though they haven’t published the Bill yet. It would let tenants start treating their home as something long term and give stability to those of us who can’t save.”Though the formal government consultation on scrapping Section 21 was concluded on October 12th 2019, and the Tories’ intent was reiterated in Boris Johnson’s Queen’s Speech after their December 2019 election win, the law remains intact.Thousands of students at universities including Manchester, Sheffield, Liverpool, Bristol, Aberdeen, Sussex, SOAS, Durham, Plymouth, UCL, York, Goldsmiths, Bath, Stirling, UAL, Surrey, Oxford and Cambridge have organised rent strikes in response to their farcical mistreatment at the hands of various unscrupulous cynical university managements during the COVID-19 crisis. The results have been heartening. This is a demonstration of the power collective action can still hold, in spite of centuries’ worth of attempts to break it. Of course, building class consciousness and solidarity, and the organising in general is somewhat easier when the tenants (fellow students) and target of resistance (university management) are clearly identifiable. The atomisation of tenants and myriad landlords of the private rented sector make this slightly more challenging to coordinate. I point you in the direction of rent-strike.org for information, strategic materials, legal info and other organising contacts.
ENSURE “NO-FAULT” EVICTIONS ARE ABOLISHED
RENT STRIKES!
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IMPLEMENT VIENNA’S HOUSING SYSTEM
…OR SINGAPORE’S LAND NATIONALISATION
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CONVERT THE FORMER WEWORKS
…OR DON’T CONVERT THEM
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According to Zoopla, a cool £275,000! For a small slice of a building that was built for the express purpose of commerce, not habitation! A further addendum is that, despite scouring various sites, I couldn’t find a single property in the building for sale, but multiple ones for rent at around £650pcm, minimum. Which a) is more than my rent in Zone 2 London, and b) indicative that all of the properties have been snapped up by buy-to-let landlords! Seems healthy!Hatherley believes the office conversion will be the Tories’ answer to dwindling support among younger generations. “I think the idea behind that is: you get people all into a flat in the Archway Tower or what have you, then you will restart the owner-occupancy system. And those people will feel that they have a stake in it and they'll feel like they're homeowners, and you will no longer get the situation where barely 15 percent of young people vote Conservative. And that's really what it's all about.”“I don't think it's going to work, because people pretend not to be grateful for crap. Even in Britain, people tend to have some awareness of when they're being sold pap.”A lot of people seem to think the 2007-2009 global financial crisis is far too complicated to comprehend, but I’ve watched The Big Short, so I reckon I can confidently assert that a large contributory factor was the risky lending in the mortgage market, where people without the requisite resources to pay back their mortgages were given mortgages, and then - surprisingly - defaulted on them. This, in turn, caused the Line To Go Down. All the money the banks had created and issued as credit was nearly lost to the ether, and all they had to show for it were all the rapidly depreciating properties they repossessed from their ruined, defaulting customers. Then governments stepped in, for instance, the UK, where we gave them a £500 billion rescue package.
STOP UNCONDITIONALLY BAILING OUT THE BANKS
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So, in effect, public money was given to banks to cover their losses, while their customers lost everything. “That's why [banks] love mortgage lending,” says Youel. “Even if the loans fail, they get to keep the property.”“With no real reforms, like in 2008, we're bailing out a system which is inflating house prices [and] basically encourages them to keep inflating house prices, because they know they'll get bailed out when the bubble bursts.”This seems like it should be illegal. But it's not. Lol.“You cannot work with these institutions,” Hatherley insists, in full polemical swing. “I don't think you can really regulate something like Persimmon or Barratt Homes, or what have you. You just have to smash them to pieces.”“You look at the Grenfell inquiry. The housing system in this country is utterly corrupt. And, you know, have been building unsafe buildings for a very long time. The same companies putting flammable cladding on now, are frequently linked to the companies that are building system-built towers that fell down in the late 60s. It's the same people, and that system just has to be broken. They have to be bought up, taken over and broken apart.” “I think any kind of reforming government would have to look at that, because those kinds of house building companies and the construction industry and so on, have always been very closely linked to the Conservative Party. They are deeply corrupt, and they have blood on their hands.”
SMASH THE HOUSE BUILDERS
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CRASH THE HOUSING MARKET
STOP THE HOUSING MARKET FROM CRASHING
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