Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis

(Hardback)

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Britain has become a nation of renters and landlords and building more housing is not the solution. In his radical new interpretation of the housing crisis lawyer Nick Bano proposes that it is rent not house prices that is at the core of the problem. Despite economic boom and bust, why has the cost of housing continued to skyrocket since the 1970s Bano argues that rents have also continued to rise - supported by housing benefit payments and weakening housing laws on evictions. The state has colluded with the market as social housing provision has been replaced by payments, spirally ever higher. A Crisis by Design shows that a permanent crisis is not a happenstance of global economics or political incompetence, but has been engineered on purpose. Such a crisis has resulted in the fire at Grenfell and widespread precarity for renters. Bano also shows that this is not just a London problem but can be seen across the country, and that it is inherently racist in nature. It instils anxiety and inequality in order to maintain ever increasingly profits. Bano's radical diagnosis show why the solutions proscribed by diverse experts have gone wrong, and what we should do about. It is firstly a problem of the law, and this demands immediate reform to questions of property and land values. Then, policy: the laws concerning renting and landlordism. Finally, it is question of supply: where to build and who for.

Reviews

A devastating, forensic, careful, considered attack on the bustard landlords and every lie, nastiness and evil that they represent. -- Danny Dorling, author of Shattered Nation
One of the best and most rigorous explanations of how the current system is rigged in favour of landlords and why that needs to change. -- Vicky Spratt, author of Tenants
Incisive and righteously indignant. With the experience of a barrister and the sensibility of an activist, Nick Bano helps us imagine an alternative social and economic order: a world without landlordism. -- David Madden, author of In Defense of Housing
This is a really important contribution to the debate and a vital corrective. Nick Bano lays out in clear and succinct language the real cause of the housing crisis, which is that it is, above all, a crisis of price caused by high rents. -- Anna Minton, author of Big Capital
Essential reading for everyone in the housing movement, and anyone else who wants to understand the central role of housing-wealth generation and exploitation in the British economy. Debunking conventional thinking about the housing system, Against Landlords offers a clear and convincing explanation of how we got into the current crisis, and, most importantly, how we can begin to get out of it. -- Alva Gotby, author of They Call It Love
So much more than 'another book about the housing crisis', Against Landlords is a book which takes aim at lazy thinking on all sides of the housing debate. Rooted in a deep knowledge of housing law - and its effects on those whose lives are made miserable by Britain's housing system - Bano combines histories from both below and above. He describes with controlled anger how the British state consciously created a landlord's paradise, and how easily things could be otherwise. Indeed, as he makes clear against fashionable fatalism, we've solved this problem before, and could so again. -- Owen Hatherley, author of Clean Living in Difficult Circumstances

Author Bio

Nick Bano is an author and Barrister who specialises in representing homeless people, residential occupiers, and destitute and migrant households. he has written in Tribune, the New Socialist, and Jacobin.