U.K. Barrister Nick Bano explores the themes covered in his book Against Landlords. Bano specializes in representing homeless people and residential tenants and migrants in housing struggles.
Bano says landlords were on their way to extinction in the U.K. through the start of the 1970s, but deregulation of the private rental sector and a sell off of socially owned housing brought them back.
“We have a system that’s specifically designed to make sure that rents go up, to make sure that land is a good investment for landlords, and that drives up the cost of housing for everyone more broadly, so it drives up the cost of housing if you’re an owner occupier, it drives up the cost of housing for the state, who often have to subsidize landlords by way of kind of housing benefits and things of that nature,” Bano says.
“It drives up the cost for employers because wages have to be very, very high so that people can afford their homes. So, ultimately, it’s this enormous amount of money that we call rent, which is confiscated from society and privatized and everybody else has to pay for it in one way or in one way or another.”
“ I think that the British experience is partly that good landlord is a contradiction in terms, and partly that everyone seems to think that they are one, but that can’t be right, because rent levels are so high, and when you look at that 9 percent rate of rent inflation. If there are good landlords who are charging below market prices, they’re a rounding error,” he says.
“If you’re interested in quote unquote, good landlords, if you’re interested in people who charge low rents and do repairs and are generally very nice, then experience shows us that you can’t leave that to the whims of individuals.Surely, if you want that for tenants, you want that for everyone’s tenants, not just the tenants of people you consider to be good landlords. You have to enforce good landlordism. You have to use the weapons of the state, the weapons of the law to say, ‘no, you cannot charge above this much rent. You must do these repairs. And, if one of you is going to be a landlord, then all of you have to be good landlords.'”
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