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Unlike in the US where private companies step in to fill the gap left by a welfare state never having really been built, in the UK, private companies deliver previously public services. The services remain free at the point of use (with the exception of dentistry), but many are run by private companies. The performance of the companies running these services is monitored by the body that would have originally provided the service themselves – national and local government, local NHS structures and so on. The process of outsourcing, of paying private companies to carry out the work of public services, accelerated in the 1980s with the introduction of ‘compulsory competitive tendering’. This legislation placed a requirement on public sector organisations to tender all contracts for service delivery, meaning that anyone could bid for them. The contract was awarded to the company that would provide the service the most cheaply. This duty was relaxed slightly in 1997 but by then outsourcing was established as the new normal. Now, £284 billion per year is spent buying goods and services from external suppliers. This is about a third of all of public expenditure21 and 13% of GDP.22
A potentially more helpful set of debates can be found around the question of what those who employ cleaners – particularly those who consider themselves feminists – ought to pay them. Academic philosopher, Arianne Shahvisi, argues that if ‘people outsource cleaning chiefly to save themselves time, they should presumably pay the cleaner for the cost of that time’.23 As many people earn more than the average cleaner’s wage, about £12 per hour, this would mean a significant increase in the hourly wage for cleaners.24 As well as valuing their employee’s time as equal to their own, Shahvisi argues for working hours across all sectors that leave all people with enough time for reproductive labour, with men being expected to do their fair share. These two goals are potentially helpful ones, but they do not extend beyond the horizon of the individual household. It seems important that we demand a reduction in the amount of reproductive work by increasing communal provisions. We might imagine canteens, as Rebecca May Johnson does in an essay on the nationalised ‘British Restaurants’ set up during the Second World War but allowed to decline in the peacetime years that followed.25 These would be open to all, with decent working and eating conditions. We could imagine universal childcare, and support for collective ways of living that reduce the duplication of reproductive effort that the existing household model creates. When labour is made available cheaply because of the stickiness of low pay for women and the exploitation of migrant workers, there is a disincentive for the development of technological innovation: if it’s cheaper to exploit someone than to come up with technology that reduces the time spent on that task or even obliterate it entirely. In fact, in interwar Britain, the development of domestic appliances and even the shift to the use of electricity and gas in heating and cooking were delayed by the easy ability to hire servants.26 Nowadays, household technologies are either expensive gimmickry or minor updates to existing machines, like digital rather than manual dials for washing machines. In fact, many new ‘innovations’ in domestic technology depend on the existence of a cheap pool of easily exploitable labour – like the American start-up making smart fridges that not only alert their owners when they’ve run out of milk, but raise an order for milk on Instacart, powered by poorly paid platform gig work.27
This book is both polemic and guide. It begins from the assumption that everyone deserves a safe and stable home, or the right to use public space as they wish, simply by virtue of being alive. This is what we mean when we say housing is a human right, no different than the right to breathe the air on this earth: you are born with this right; you should not have to earn it; you should not have to work for it. For us, “Housing is a human right” is not a slogan meant to urge us to tinker at the margins of a broken system. It is not an ideal for which we should calmly strive. Every second we live when housing is not respected as a human right is a violation. We remain stuck in this degraded world by means of exploitation and domination, by an economic system that enriches landlords by extracting wealth from tenants, by a political system that enshrines the right to private gains over public good, the right to property over the right to life.
These dire statistics and degrading experiences are often collected under the banner of “the housing crisis.” But the capitalist housing system is working exactly as designed: to enrich landlords, developers, and real estate speculators. In the 2010s, landlords raked in over $4.5 trillion from tenants in rent payments.6 In 2019 alone, those rent payments totaled $512.4 billion. As land-lording has become an irresistible way to make money, landlords have taken over more and more homes, enriching corporations and the already rich. In 2021, landlords bought nearly one in seven homes sold in the forty largest US cities—and nearly one in three homes sold in Black neighborhoods.7 Framing the consequences of our housing system as a “housing crisis” ignores that from the perspective of its winners, the system works just fine. The capitalist housing system isn’t designed to provide the best quality housing to the most tenants. It’s designed to maximize profits and to extract the most rent.
Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are. Our lives are wrecked and wrung by price gouging, eviction, and displacement. We suffer trauma, loss, precarity, panic, poor health, and premature death. For poor and working-class people, particularly people of color, this crisis is permanent. The capitalist housing system has never provided universal access to safe and stable homes, and the policies enshrined by our federal, state, and municipal governments—both its compromised regulations and its deliberate deregulations—maintain crisis as the norm.
The frame of “housing crisis” trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, interchangeable “housing units” and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives.
All human beings need shelter. All human beings need a home. If we don’t own property, we have to pay rent to meet these needs. Rent is a fine for having a human need. If we can’t afford to buy a home, from the day we are separated from our parents or caretakers, we have no choice but to pay rent. We don’t get to decide if we pay or not, and we don’t get to decide how much we pay. In the absence of rent controls, landlords have complete price-setting power. Average rents have more than doubled over the last two decades, while wages have plateaued for the last four.10 Over the last half a century, as wages stagnated and the cost of rent ballooned, we’ve simply paid more and more to keep our housing. We’ve had no other choice.
Rent is the gap between tenants’ needs and landlords’ demands. It benefits tenants for housing to be built to last, well maintained, easily accessible, and cheap; tenants need stability, safety, a place to live and make a life. It benefits landlords for housing to be cheaply produced, rarely maintained, scarce, and expensive; landlords seek to maximize profit, driving down costs and driving up rents. They want to take more money out and put ever less back in. This is the fundamental contradiction between the use of a home as a place to live and the use of a home as a place to extract wealth, what it means to live inside a system in which housing is something used to make a profit.
The third of Americans who rent their housing make these payments to a handful of corporations and the mere 6.7 percent of the population who own that housing. This is a transfer of wealth from over 100 million tenants to just over 11 million landlords.15 The poorest Americans are overwhelmingly tenants; the richest own real estate.16 Rent is an engine of inequality. If you’ve played the board game Monopoly, you understand the idea: a roll of the dice and a purchase allow you to extract rents until everyone else is bankrupt.
Tenants work; landlords live off our labor. According to 2021 US Census data, the average individual landlord spends less than four hours a month maintaining a property, while the average revenue they claim on that property is over $25,000 a month.17 The “passive” income of rent is active income stolen from those of us who work.18
The supposed cure for renting is owning your own home. But rent is a trap. When tenants try to buy a house, we find that landlords already have the advantage. Tax work-arounds, special interest rates, and all-cash offers make housing effectively cheaper the more money you have, crowding us out of options.23 Our landlords can buy more buildings just by pulling out equity from their mortgages or borrowing against the buildings they already have.24 They can use their assets, which we pay for, to surf from debt to debt. Meanwhile, as homes get more expensive and further out of reach, tenants are compelled to keep renting for a longer period of time. The longer we rent, the further we are from saving enough to compete. Paying rent is keeping us from reaching the first rung of that imagined “property ladder.” And our lost ground is our landlords’ gain.25 Our rents don’t just vanish when we send in our checks. They pay off our landlords’ mortgages, so they can claim their second (or fourth, or hundredth) house.26 When people say paying rent is like “throwing money in the trash,” they’re only half right; it’s our trash can, but our landlord’s bank account.
Landlord lobbyists have crusaded to rebrand themselves as “housing providers” and rid themselves of the feudal title that makes their power clear, but landlords do not “provide” housing, they extract rent from housing by hoarding the places where we can live.27 When our rents are leveraged for more housing grabs, landlords take over more and more space.28 Already-wealthy people, corporations, and financial firms profit; more of us are tenants than ever before.29 Rent is an engine of consolidation. It drives the ownership of housing into fewer and fewer hands.30 In 2013, Invitation Homes issued the first-ever rent-backed security with 3,200 homes in its portfolio.31 Just ten years later, the company now owns more than 80,000 homes nationwide. Its business model turns rents into securities to sell to investors, so they can buy up more homes, and start over again.
Securing housing doesn’t mean competing just with other people who want to use it to live in. It means competing with people and corporations who want to use it to make money. More than 68 percent of the world’s wealth is held in real estate, and 79 percent of that is in residential housing. In 2020, the total residential real estate value in the US—the second-largest share in the world—amounted to $258.5 trillion: that’s more valuable than all global equities and debt securities combined, more than twenty times more valuable than all the gold ever mined.59 To speak in the language of supply and demand, the price of housing is not determined just by local demand for housing, but by the global search for opportunities to seek profit.60 The housing market doesn’t produce homes, it produces opportunities for investment.
Neither building nor, for that matter, blocking new private housing will overcome the misery and injustice of rent. We need to transform the power relations that keep this system in place. We need to break the private monopoly on development—its stranglehold over the pace and type of production, determined by profitability and not by our needs. We need to break the private monopoly of landlords over pieces of the earth—the hoarding of human shelter that ensures they can extract rent from us and evict us at their will. We need to dismantle the institutions of state violence, which empower the real estate industry to draw profit from a fundamental human need.
The housing crisis is not a problem to be solved; it is a class struggle to be fought and won. The conclusion that Engels drew still applies now: “In order to make an end to this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class.”75 Rent is a fundamental engine of inequality and injustice, a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, which drives millions into debt and despair and onto the streets. From the perspective of tenants, the answer to the housing crisis is as simple as it is revolutionary: a world without landlords and a world without rent. Our self-interest as tenants isn’t just fixing the leak in our shower; it’s dismantling the capitalist unhousing system.