One giant oversight by the article: changes in household size.
In the United States one reason why supply-demand is all fucky right now is that household sizes are smaller than ever. Singles, couples, and empty nesters comprise more of the population than ever before, and they’re frequently living in housing that previously would have accommodated a family of four or more. So even if the housing supply and population stay constant, if fewer people are living in each housing unit you’ll get a shortage. Yet nowhere in the article’s numerical analysis is there mention of this phenomenon. Given the demographic similarities between the US and UK I’m assuming household sizes are shrinking there too.
This is not to say that landlords aren’t a problem, but the entire premise of the article is that based on population and housing supply trends the supply “crisis” does not exist, which without incorporating changes in household size into their calculations is simply not a conclusion you can make.
quindraco@lemm.ee 7 months ago
I skimmed the article, but I missed the actual meat of the proposal. Did anyone catch how landlords are supposed to be abolished? Would they just… ban charging rent and leave it up to judges to define “rent”?
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 7 months ago
It doesn't say, which is a little weird. This article explains it a little better.
Basically as I understand it, before the 1980s, the government owned a lot of the housing and rented it to people at fixed prices. This meant that renting for profit was tough, and a lot of landlords actually sold their property to the government as council housing. That changed under Thatcher, who enabled private sales of the council housing, which originally sounded like a good idea (you can own the home you're already living in instead of renting it from the government), but increased privatization led to rent for profit led to inflation of monthly rent led to oh no.
The simple fix I suspect, is for the government to start buying up properties again for rent-at-reasonable-prices to tenants, competing with private landlords and poking a hole in the bubble of ever-increasing rents (with popping the bubble giving a lot of extra leverage as compared with the amount of money they're actually putting into the system.)
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 7 months ago
Reagan and Thatcher engineered the hell we live in (in these two countries, anyway).
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Sounds a lot like what municipalities in Finland are doing. A lot of the cities have city owned rental properties and actively develop land as part of city planning.
Nemo@midwest.social 7 months ago
Early on:
were how landlords were put out of business the first time. Not regulation, but economic levers that made renting out property unprofitable.
Presumably, these levers still exist and can be pulled. It’s mentioned right after that the Thatcher administration worked to undo these effects, but the article moved on without further discussing how in detail.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Rent controls for private rents can be tricky. Sometimes it leads to money paid under the counter on top of rent, which is of course undesirable in a few ways. But having publicly owned (municipal etc) rental properties are an easier way to push rents down. But that also has a lot of trickiness in it.