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Against Landlords:How to Solve the Housing Crisis
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When landlords always win and renters pay the price, what can be done?
Housing means prosperity and security for some; poverty, precarity and sickness for others. More people live in private rented accommodation than ever before, and rents rise without apparent reason. Homes are smaller every year, and nearly 20 per cent of tenants live in hazardous conditions. Homelessness is at a new high. Yet the government’s only solution is to promote homeownership.
Against Landlords shows that this crisis is not the product of happenstance or political incompetence. Government policy has intentionally split British citizens into homeowners and renters, two classes set on very different financial paths. In the UK, one out of every twenty-one adults is a landlord, and it is this group, and those who aspire to join it, represented by the political class.
In his radical new interpretation of the housing crisis, lawyer Nick Bano explains how this environment set the conditions for the Grenfell Tower fire and how it means a life of anxiety for the nation’s renters. It is a problem that stretches far beyond London and one inherently racist in nature.
Building more housing is not the solution. It is firstly a problem of the law, Bano argues, and reforms must sweep away the landlordism at the heart of the housing crisis and British political life.
Reviews
A powerful weapon against those who think that building is the answer to everything
A devastating, forensic, careful, considered attack on the bustard landlords and every lie, nastiness and evil that they represent.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Against Landlords is an incisive and engaging take on the housing crisis, with some crucial commentary that anyone interested in housing would benefit from reading.
, rs21 -
Uncomfortably relevant ... reading Against Landlords right now is rather like flipping through Peter Benchley's Jaws while sitting in a rapidly deflating rubber dingy and being circled by some very pointy fins ... Bano has proven he has the courage to show some much-needed imagination, while most commentary and debate around housing in the UK is typified by a depressing lack thereof.
, Heckle -
We are in a total mess. We stole the future prospects, security, health and mental wellbeing of an entire generation in order to create an extractive paradise for a handful of rentiers. Bano paints this bleak, bleak, bleak picture with admirable clarity.
, Representology -
Timely ... will send a chill down the backs of landlords everywhere
, View Digital -
Excellent ... Bano sets out clearly and convincingly how we have all been hoodwinked into thinking that house price rises are due to lack of supply and therefore the solution to the housing crisis is to build more houses.
, Counterfire -
A refreshing alternative to the droning hymns of free-market proselytisers ... Bano's salient and ardent analysis confronts the realities of the law, regulation and capitalism itself.
, Red Pepper -
Excellent ... highly recommended
, Morning Star