Homes for All! The Case for Appropriation of Housing
By: Miles Pressland
Tags: Labour Party, Socialism, Housing, Economics, Britain

It should be clear to all that the state of the housing market in Britain is not working. Student activists are currently organising more than twenty rent strikes, justifiably angered by the increasing cost of rent conferred upon students by universities. As many as 300,000 people are homeless, forced either to ‘couch surf’ or sleep on the streets, where they face the most atrocious conditions; a further 290,000 households in England were owed assistance from councils to prevent homelessness. And in cities like London, the poor and working classes are increasingly pushed out by rising rent costs and stagnant or falling wages in real terms.

If hundreds of thousands of people have no place to call home; if hundreds of thousands of people teeter on the brink of utter collapse; if working people are unable to live in their cities; and if students are unable to attend their universities without working excessive hours alongside their studies to afford housing, something has gone very, very wrong.

Led by Sadiq Khan, Labour has increasingly looked to rent controls, as an inevitable and much-needed response to skyrocketing rent. While admirable, a far more radical proposal has been left unnoticed, and undiscussed — that of appropriating for-rent housing. A not-insignificant amount of the housing market is taken up by what may be called ‘mom-and-pop’ renters — families who rent out one or two homes to supplement their income, or provide them with a respectable retirement. To appropriate these homes would, I suspect, do more harm than good. Increasingly however, a large percentage of the housing market — especially in cities like London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds — is owned and operated by large housing firms, which may own tens or hundreds of properties. The price gouging these companies rely on is evident to anybody who has had to rent, and the services they offer is often abysmal, with repairs left unattended to for months, and vulnerable tenants like students gouged further for their deposit for nonsense claims.

Given the demonstrable harm these large companies have wreaked upon communities, through their monopolisation of the housing market and their constant raising of rent prices, one must ask whether they should be allowed to continue such activities in a market sorely in need of low-cost housing. Further, why should we stop at demanding rent price controls? Instead, could we not look to appropriate these houses altogether, offering them to tenants at cost price? The scale of the economic reward to working and lower-middle class tenants would be unbelievable, and with significant savings in their rent prices, one should have little doubt that they would go on to spend their new-found cash in the market, buying new consumer goods and/or investing in business opportunities; at a time when our economy is suffering, this would be a wonderful release of capital into the community, whereas now this capital is tied up in the banks of rich landlords, who offer little to no services for their extracted rent.

The precise management of these new state-owned houses could be done in a multitude of ways. Some could be ran as housing cooperatives, wherein a tenant’s union owns and manages the household. Some could be retained as council-ran homes, designed to aid the most needy in our communities. Some could be ran by state-owned student organisations, designed to provide low-cost rent housing to students who are currently at the behest of their respective universities.

At a time when so many people are homeless, while others are struggling to retain their home, is it not time we radically reassessed how we manage housing in this country? Is it not time that we acknowledged the right all should have to a roof over their heads and a place to call home? Do we think these large landlord firms have some inalienable right to retain their vast abundances of property capital, despite having contributed to the worsening conditions of the communities they are supposed to serve? The appropriation of property owned by these entities can act as the beginning of a radical reassessment of our housing market, which could also act as a much-needed boon to our economy.