Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis

by Nick Bano

A radical new intervention into the housing debate, and what we can do about it

Why do landlords always win, and renters pay the price? 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 - Britain has become a nation of renters and landlords. 1 in 24 UK residents are now landlords. The state has colluded with the market as social housing provision has been replaced by payments, spirally ever higher.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.

As a consequence, building more housing is not the solution. 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, the laws concerning renting and landlordism. Finally, it is question of where to build and who for.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Economics, Urbanism, Urban Planning, Sociology, Society

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2024

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Engaging read about how landlords profit off rising rents which prolongs the financial marginalization of the tenant class. Appreciated how Nick Bano named the intersections with racism and racial marginalization within housing inequity. Interesting to think about both incremental change and to envision what a more radical rehaul of the capitalist landlord system would look like.

[alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

i’m so glad i read this book. at its core it is a book on capitalism, one that treats housing holistically, without shying away from the very roots of property wealth: colonialism and imperialism. its contribution emerges both from law and marx’s critique of political economy (heart eyes) and could not be more needed. nick bano brilliantly draws from policy and economics to illustrate just how the crisis created by private renting is fundamentally by design. how the status quo is simply unsustainable and how we can, and have to, move forward.

it’s difficult for me to explain it but i almost felt emotional reading this book because of how frustrated i had been at the situation. it’s hard to bear witness to how deeply dehumanizing the housing crisis is and to have to hear so much defeat and resignation surrounding the subject, as though we are simply stuck with this horrible system which we should just learn to work with. bano does not subscribe to this, he names the problems as they are, and offers realistic and systemic alternatives. this makes his book an immensely hopeful one. even if it is very uk-centric, i think everyone would benefit from reading it, and i hope more people do !

[David Whitney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book on housing I’ve ever read.

[ayesha kamran · Rating 5 out of 5]

I drank this book like it was reviving me from the pits of dehydration. Amazing amazing amazing.

[Nigel Carvalho · Rating 5 out of 5]

”The housing question is not class conflict in the usual sense but rather a state of civil war.”

One of the best books I’ve read on housing in years! Having worked in housing/development for ~4 years in Canada, Bano filled some major gaps for me about why governments do not move on housing affordability. The connections between how rising rents don’t just benefit landlords but all homeowners (since land is valued based on perceived rental yields, all property assets rise in value as an area’s rents increase) is made refreshingly explicit, as well as how a dependence on rising housing costs has been intentionally folded into national economies. In the wake of austerity policies and the promotion of property wealth as the only hope for people to retire, we basically have a system that relies on the tenant class to struggle for everyone else’s financial comfort.

[Xuagram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book that encapsulates how an entire generation feels. All the solutions are in this book, everyone should read it.

[Joshua Turek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by a for the people tenant lawyer, its about the UK so some of the details and policies I check out on but the larger philosophical points and the current world climate under late stage capitalism is so pertinent. We are not going to build our way out of this crisis because housing is a necessity and thus without regulations is monopolistic. An entire economy has been built on home values which rise because of rising rents. The landlords can charge whatever they want and building new housing is not going to mean they want to gift us cheaper livelihoods. We need to organize and demand policies that make it less attractive to be a landlord as it was years ago. We don’t have to accept their rules, their thievery of our labor. Landlords do not provide housing they withhold it.

[Rosie · Rating 5 out of 5]

one to bring to a living rent branch reading group! there was some of this I wanted to interrogate more & threads I wanted to follow further - especially the mentions of housing & the climate crisis. but the best political books are tools you have to use yourself to push your organising & analysis further and this is that tenfold

[Nathan Chattaway · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was my first focused effort to understand a topic that is near and dear to us all from a neo-Marxist perspective. There was some excellent investigative journalism on display, but the content was too repetitive. Bano focused on defining and proving causes for the housing crisis too much, at the expense of laying out his vision for exactly how a solution would be implemented or function over say, the next decade. Regardless, this is a very ambitious little book and I suspect Bano will be back with a refined and expanded version in the near future.

Note to Government bureaucrats everywhere: This book can teach you a thing or two about actual data-driven insights. Don't spend all your public budgets on shiny Data Analytics tools; make do with what you have to actually analyse cause and effect over 70 years of policy and legislation, and then propose and adopt/revert to the ideas that have produced the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people.

So am I a raging Communist now? Not at all. But certainly, in Australia and the UK, the housing situation is not currently a freely operating capitalist market anyway. If Govt policy distorts the market in favour of landlords at the expense of access to suitable housing for many, that's not the best outcome. Let's legislate to at least reduce housing from the current "sure-thing" 5% p.a. return investment to "speculation" status or even a basic human right, to calm down this raging inflation. It has been done, and it can be done again.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good read, very informative and good historical context and the central message about rents and house prices came through strongly. The title is a bit misleading though as there weren’t many direct recommendations for ‘how to solve the housing crisis’

[Evan Wragg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for tenants and with a bit of luck policy makers too

[Justina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time and time again, when it comes to any social issues, I have the moral stance, which I can't really explain by the laws or real life experiences. I just *know* the system is wrong, but I am too stupid to give any proper solutions.
And I am so glad that I found this book, that explains exactly how I feel about housing in Britain. Having had to be a part of this housing crisis for the last 8 or so years, it's such a relief to have facts to back my anger and hatred towards landlords.
The book title is a little bit misleading, because Nick Bano doesn't give clear steps as to how exactly solve this problem. He himself says in the book, "This is a book about capitalism - and, more precisely, about housing under capitalism. "
He also says that poor housing law leads directly to housing crisis. "The crisis has now reached a point where there will need to be political responses, and the central question is what our aims and methods should be."
But to tackle the issue, you have to understand *why* landlords shouldn't exist in the first place, and how the housing market is a huge scam. This book does exactly that, and points at the right direction - we *need* tougher rent controls, tougher laws on landlords, regulate the rented housing, *tax* the living s*** of landlords' profits, and decommodify housing.
This book justified my anger about this whole issue, and I will recommend it to everyone who doesn't think landlords are the modern evil.
Nick Bano also does a great job of giving you a history lesson, sheding a light on the fact that it's been done before, and we can do it again, if we stop being so pessimisitic and accepting of the world where landlords profit (an insane amount) off our basic human needs.

Absolutely wonderful read.

[Tim Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading - changed my perspective from the housing crisis being caused by not enough homes to, in reality, it being due to the law (and those that make it) pandering to landlords. Uncapped rents and an almost unlimited power to evict leads to a supremely unfair power imbalance between landlords and tenants. Not only that, but the perpetual increase of uncapped rents drives up house prices, making it even more impossible for those of my generation to have any hope of owning their own home.

Main takeaway - equalise the power imbalance and introduce rent caps, both through legislation, and that will go some way to solving this crisis.

[Alex Macleod · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a bit of a mess of ideas but pretty convincing overall

[Artem Gordin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, even if narrowly focused on the UK. Also very witty — nice to have a chuckle while boiling with anger at Margaret Thatcher.

[Elektra Bishop · Rating 2 out of 5]

A knowledge Compound Bookclub choice:

This is a 1.5 star rating really. I am so disappointed with not only this book, but the editor and all the people who gave it 4 and 5 stars who are just as complicit in the misleading narrative that it had ANY answers at all about the housing crisis.

If this book was sold as 'everything that is wrong with housing today' I could have swallowed it. I may not have suggested it for book club, but it still would have sat on my TBR list anyway. But the audacity to put a byline of 'How to solve the housing crisis' and then to not put forward any solutions beyond 'make houses cheaper' and 'change the housing laws' is cruel really. Some people in their review said "every tenant should read this book". Why? what good would it do them? Every tenant should probably read a few pages of Shelters website that tells them exactly what they should expect from their letting agent, tenancy agreement and landlord, as well as what their rights are and how to file a complaint. This majority of this book was basically an edited transcript of a few bright people moaning over a pint in a gastropub.

The whole way through the book he says that every time the government try to fix the current crisis they make it worse for poor and minority people and actually push house prices up. So when he glibly says housing reform as a 'solution' with no meat on the bones, no details, no new ideas what hope is it supposed to give anyone?

Also a prevalent theme through the book is how houses are under occupied. In the beginning when he plays his 'ace' of 'we don't have a shortage of homes, we have more properties than households - everything you've been told is a lie' it felt quite revolutionary. That is not the narrative we are used to at all - maybe there is hope. But a bit of basic thought tells us that the extra homes we have are mainly in areas that not enough people want to live in, that don't have the infrastructure to support workers or families. So yes there are homes, but not where people want them. This alongside his bemoaning of councils shipping people out to these areas away from their communities. Its not right for councils to do it, so its definitely not right to keep using the statistic of more homes than households as a valid point.

Plus, take my mum for instance. She is now single and lives in a 3 bed cottage that she owns outright. LUCKY! I know, huge amounts of privilege to be in such a position but also some hard work and good decision making. What should she do? Move out to a one bed apartment somewhere? She's nowhere near retirement community age. She loves having people over to stay, the grandkids love to visit, she's hosted community events planning, village choir meets, she's happy and comfortable in a home she's worked for and paid for and maintained for 20 years - all of which society has been telling her is the right thing to do. When the author talks about 'under occupied' what does he want us to do with that? again, not one mention of actual solutions. Should she take in lodgers? I would genuinely like to know what he thinks people with an extra spare room should do? He never mentioned the awful practice of the bedroom tax for council tenants which I'm sure he was opposed to (as was I).

So the argument of we actually do already have enough housing but its just too expensive is crap. I mean I wholeheartedly agree its too expensive! I would love cheaper housing. but thats a book on dismantling capitalism - not this book. He doesn't say what we should do about foreign investment, about huge corporations becoming the biggest landlords in the country - he tells us its happening, scares us with how much worse its going to get because of it... but not one suggestion of how we could stop it, or how the government could stop it except 'taxes'.

I've given it 1.5 stars because I think the history lesson will be quite valuable when I'm having discussions about housing and Thatchers damning legacy in future. The fact that we were so close in the late 70's and just how much damage Thatcher did was a big talking point in the book club discussion and the books only real saving grace. I also thought his chapter on race and discrimination was good. He made some good points with good examples that only the most sour of souls could disagree with. Again though, no solutions, only admissions that most attempts to fix housing problems leave exactly these people even further out in the cold.

His attitude that all landlords should feel ashamed of themselves, while simultaneously admitting that landlords are now 1 in 6 people was gross. Yes this world is unfair, yes thats shit. He makes pointless observations acknowledging that millennials have had it so rough so far and none of the good economics that previous generations have had, says it would be really unlucky for them if the house price market was to massively crash leaving them with no value there either. but seems to want that to happen anyway.

I carried on reading the book, depressing description of unfairness and greed after depressing description of unfairness and greed - that I am already painfully aware of - excited for his answers at the end. Waiting for promised solutions that never came. Obviously one person cannot fix this issue. But I really thought he might have some well thought out, well reasoned suggestions. A huge disappointment.

[Lachlan Macfarlane · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and eye-opening read from a radical UK barrister about the housing crisis in the UK.

My only criticism is that for some reason the blurb, marketing, and the author himself think that the book operates as a refutation of YIMBYism and supply-side reforms. The author seems ignorant of the aims of the YIMBY movement (unless they are different in the UK). In Australia, YIMBYs aim to fight planning laws which artificially prevent new builds in inner-city areas; such areas are inevitably governed by councils controlled by richer, whiter, and older residents. These are the very cohort of petty landlords the author rails against. His contention that supply is a red herring is only supported by the assertion that there are plenty of empty or underutilised homes and that new developments don't always lower local property values. The latter point is irrelevant if demand continues to exceed supply, and the former point is irrelevant if empty homes are poorly located, or if there are incentives against downsizing, a separate issue. He never mentions Japan, where deregulation and competition for supply have kept housing cheap and plentiful. It is possible to advocate for planning reforms whilst also supporting public housing and tenants' rights, which would both benefit from such reforms.

With that aside, the book is a powerful historical review of centuries of crisis in housing from a working-class, unionist (indeed Marxist) perspective. The problems which the UK and other Western, particularly English-speaking countries face, are not new, nor are they impossible to solve. They are the result of neoliberal (Thatcherite) policy choices made around the 1980s, gutting public housing, cutting taxes and services, but simultaneously allowing owner-occupiers and investors to balloon their share of the nation's wealth. In effect, this has moved the burden of supporting the entire economy on to an insecure, poverty-stricken tenant class which sees none of the reward for its efforts.

Petty landlords have arisen en masse to police and profit from this new status quo. Gone are the days of rent strikes and direct action against institutional landlords. The new oppressors are overwhelmingly individuals - relatives, churchgoers, the elderly, the familiar - armed with tax breaks, estate agents, and an ideology that they are somehow benevolent housing "providers". With the evils and injustices of residential landlordism distributed so widely, we have forgotten how to be disgusted by its parasitic, toxic nature, both to the individual and to the economy, morally and financially.

It is a shocking revelation that at one point in Britain just 7% of households rented from a private landlord, the rest living in council housing or owning their own home. Rent caps and tenants' rights, fought for by unions and kept in place by both Labour and Tory governments, suppressed the absurd and annihilatory conditions now felt among renters. Now, New Labour, like the Labor party in Australia, seems an utterly toothless and clawless beast which can only perpetuate the worsening exploitation of the poorest, hardest-working, youngest, and most valuable.

In cities like London and Sydney tenants routinely pay 50% of their incomes in rent. How much youthful energy, entrepreneurialism, and simple joy is lost transferring wealth to the already relatively wealthy? How many families never start, how many succumb to despair as they must rent and sharehouse into middle age?

Something will eventually break! Books like this remind us we can rebuild better.

[E Money The Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had not realized England came so close to ending landlordism by the 1970s. Particularly looking at the situation today in its current post-Thatcher state.

The author is a housing lawyer. He writes with gravitas of having taken his studies quite seriously along with the experiences of his work. It is a dense read at parts, sparsely broken up by anecdotes.

Chapter 1 summarizes the issue. In short rents have skyrocketed while wages are stagnant. People cannot afford housing. Home ownership is low. Etc etc, super relatable we’ve heard it all before.

What novel thing Nick brings to the argument is how the issue is NOT rooted in supply. This explodes the consensus of housing problems we often hear these days.

Also Nick pains to remind the reader that landlords are exploitative parasites. Regardless of what you think about them individually, personally. They are ruining lives for their own benefit by essence.

2 gives some history and context. Of course more reasons to hate Thatcher.

But Chapter 3 is where things really pop off for me. Generational conflict gets brought up. Inheritance. The reliance of the middle class on home ownership to fill in the gaps where social services and pensions (now gutted) once stood. In short, landlording is a needed investment - become an evil bastard yourself or struggle.

Chapter 4 returns to the supply question. NIMBYS suck. YIMBYS suck. The real solution is organized tenants. Expanded social housing.

Chapter 5 goes over racism in housing. Comparisons are made to the US but the history here is not exactly the same. England didn’t redline. But people of color have been the targets of higher rents, lower quality housing. Examples are given of landlords also dodging prospective tenants on the basis of race. Etc.

Chapter 6 is mostly supporting prior arguments. More data.

Chapter 7 talks about boom bust cycles. Marx n Engels. Comparisons of today to the time of Dickens.

Chapter 8: no landlords! We did it. We read the book and won the war. Now everyone’s happy. No homeless. We all live longer. Grandma didn’t get evicted. Children didn’t starve. We can replace this shitty inefficient hvac. Hooray!

[Joe Power · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is clearly very knowledgeable and this book lays out clearly the origins of the current housing crisis in the UK and the systems that keep it in crisis. It was brilliant to see it laid out so thoroughly. Personally, I struggled with some of the sections on legislation and the minutiae therein. If you’re not well-versed in that, this book might feel like a bit of a slog, but persevere because it is worth knowing.

Some things that really stood out to me:
- How close landlords came to being extinct in the 70s
- Scotland’s recent abolition of insecure tenancies, and temporary rent caps
- The UK’s Housing Benefit Bill is the fourth biggest government expenditure at over £23 billion
- The extent to which control of UK property is sliding into the hands of massive corporations.

He also touches on how other countries have gone about treating or at least applying a salve to their own housing crises, but we’re not told very much about those strategies which is a shame.

Being critical, you’d have to say it is very London-centric. Bano does acknowledge this to be fair, dedicating part of the book to covering other regions, but we keep coming back to London.

Naturally, this book covers some periods of history but often goes back too far, and dwells there too long. Even as a fan of history, I was starting to get frustrated by our trips to the late 1800s / early 1900s. Especially since Bano often takes these detours to talk about organised resistance to landlords, but by the end of the book, rejects Engels’ revolutionary solutions and supposes legislation represents the only feasible route out. Why spend so long on it then? A focus on the post-WW1 period, maybe even post-WW2, would have tightened it up quite a bit.

[Eitan Hershkovitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic case study on the housing crisis in the United Kingdom. He does spend a fair amount of time glazing old dead philosophers but once he gets to the point he doesn't miss. Landlords are a parasite class, and we don't need them. In fact, the UK almost got rid of them in 70s and we can try and get rid of them again.

There's a lot we Yanks in the USA can learn from this book.

A key point of the book is that the recent financialization of the housing market is mistakenly seen as the reason for the housing crisis when in fact the idea of housing as a commodity is the real issue. No amount of supply economics will solve a problem of monopoly pricing.

Favorite excerpt from the book: "Indeed, when we come across opponents of rent controls, it is worth considering that, by twentieth-century standards, it is they who would have been the ones with outlandish policy demands - the extremists, the profiteers, the landlord apologists, who believed in an economy that involved skimming as much passive income from people's wages as was humanly possible. If they do not believe in rent controls, they believe that rents should be set by the market, which (in the context of urban housing) tends to mean monopoly prices. They believe in a mechanism that necessitates poverty, and by which the already-wealthy thrive on other people's money. By anyone else's standard, the world is better off without landlords."

[Callum Priestley · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a national economy dependent on sustaining and increasing the value of property, rents are continually ratcheted up as wages stay stagnant, benefiting a class of asset owners at the expense of ‘generation rent’. As property value continues to rise (ironically funded by the rent collected from a class of increasingly permanent renters), more and more people are priced out of home ownership.

Bano debunks the myth that more properties being built will solve the problem (as we currently under occupy existing property in this country and new home schemes and developments often serve to raise the prices of properties in surrounding areas, forcing the poorer members of these communities to leave (creating a doom loop of ever rising rents which makes this property even less affordable for first time buyers)) and instead argues for the redevelopment/reacquisition of social housing (without private equity involvement!) in order to offer a viable alternative to uncapped and often unsecured private tenancies.

In fact, the wider provision of social housing in the 1970s almost led to eradication of the landlord class in its entirety, only for progress to be undone by Thatcherism and its heirs up untill the current day through the selling off of social housing and refusal to implement rent caps and stronger tenant protections.

[Cal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took me so long to read, mainly because I kept picking it up, highlighting a section, going to the references, and then putting it down again .
It is very thorough and basically explains the rise of landlordism , and how property rights and capitalism have developed ( and continue to develop) hand-in-glove over hundreds of years and that this has resulted in the housing crisis that we are now in. House-price capitalism, perpetrated through the legal system, achieves its aims of perpetual rent increases and consequent growth in house values and wealth, ultimately at the cost of the tenant.
Definitely worth a read is this is your thing ( and you are against capitalism and not a profiteering landlord ).

[CHARLES SHERIDEN · Rating 2 out of 5]

Knowledgeable, Not heavy going & accessable

Can be easily read by anybody, the author clearly demonstrates their knowledge of the law, history and experience as a legal advocate.
This gives an insight into the housing Crisis we are experiencing in the UK(which is also applicable to the US).
The figures/statistics regularly supplied give credence to the arguments put forward.
One thing that sticks out for me is that 70% of households are under occupied and we in the UK have a comparative number of dwellings to population that most other countries in Europe have.
Really good read, will make you think.

[Ailís Keyes · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had such potential, but it just felt so London-centric (something I didn’t expect after a Living Rent endorsement!), and referenced Marx so much instead of more modern and relevant scholars that actually live/lived through our current rental crisis. The author seemed to boil down all rental nuances outwith London to “London-caused issues”, completely negating the complexities of rental situations particularly in devolved nations.

There were some incredibly interesting chapters, like Chapter 5 - Illegitimate Concerns: Race and Housing, but just left too much to be desired for me to give it a higher rating.

[CH1804 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very insightful read. Chapter 4, “A long view” and the other reflections about where housing policy was in the 20th century are important reminders of what is possible and what the housing rights movement should be demanding.

Overall it was a compelling and refreshing read. Bano departs from conventional wisdom that the crisis is simply an issue of supply and demand, by situating the housing crisis in the context of neoliberalism. He also acknowledges the complicated role of race in shaping discourse around housing policy.

I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in housing policy, and I will certainly be returning to it in years to come.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 🌟
This book focuses on the British housing market, and some of the features of that market make it unique. However, this book provides much more than just economic analysis and is germane to many areas that are experiencing a housing crisis.

Some of the analysis was chilling, as Bano points out that one race/generation's main source of wealth is being built upon the poverty of another, and that the exploited population doesn't have the ability to put an end to the exploitation, lest the economy, which is heavily invested in property, collapses. His takedown of housing non-profits and government rent subsidies was spot on.

[Keith Potts · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent read, and an informative debunking of the mainstream media led reasons for housing shortages and costs in the UK. I can't help but agree with the need to largely get rid of private landlords, be they individuals or corporations. Feel ashamed that I, for a small period of time, was a private landlord. I could use the excuses of circumstance, not raising rent charged for years and being a "good" landlord ... but those excuses don't stand up to the realities of the harm I was contributing to. I sold up relatively quickly because the societal issues I was contributing to didn't sit well with me, but shouldn't have gone down the landlord route to begin with.

[Quan Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is very very London centric, so much that the author is aware and dedicates a whole chapter to it - sort of frustrating to read from a Scottish perspective even if there is a nice tour to red Clyde side and Living Lent. Some of the book chapters are also a bit disorganised and it was sometimes hard to tell what the overall point of a section was

That said, excellent takedown of landlordism, and especially shines with its economic and historical analysis illustrated by cases from the authors legal work

All landlords are parasites

[Jindřich Mynarz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book explains how property prices depend on rent extraction and provides an insight into the property market in England. Limiting its scope to England is understandable, but leaves non-English readers like myself wondering if and how the lessons of the book can be transposed to other property markets. What is a generic property of global capitalism and what is an idiosyncratic confluence of legislation, history, and policy in England.

The author acknowledges Marx's Das Kapital and law reports as his main prose influences and it shows.

[Sean Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're sick of banging your head against a moldy wall while trust fund libertarians recite the first 2 pages of a 100 level economics textbook, permanently etching the words "supply and demand" in your ears, then this is the book for you.

Seriously tho, although the title is provocative Nicko (we have a close parasocial relationship) approaches the housing problem with genuine empathy - 11/10