In an era when landlords have been redefined as ‘working people’, a polemical book on abolishing them could not have been more apposite. Nick Bano’s Against Landlords is one of many recently published texts to fill this gap in the market (to coin a phrase). In just the last few months, Tracy Rosenthal’s and Leonardo Vilchis’s Abolish Rent has covered similar ground, while Kwajo Tweneboa’s Our Country in Crisis and Alva Gotby’s Feeling at Home have also offered creative solutions to Britain’s housing emergency. But what is striking about Bano’s book is how much ongoing attention it has garnered — and indeed how much controversy and debate it has generated.

The core argument of Against Landlords is that the housing crisis is less one of supply, and more to do with an inflated private rental sector — with a petit-bourgeois class of landlords uniquely placed to cash in on high housing costs at the expense of a growing body of immiserated renters. It’s a forceful and timely correction to the politics of ‘YIMBYism’ (shorthand for ‘yes in my backyard’), which argues that increased housing supply through more development is the key to ending the crisis and making housing affordable.

Britain has, after all, seen its private rented sector explode in size since the late 1970s — while at the same time acquiring more homes than there are households, more rooms per head than most European countries, and hundreds of thousands of empty homes (by some counts almost one million, or around one in 25 of UK homes). This isn’t to deny that population growth points to the need for more housing. But it is an important riposte to the notion that housebuilding alone — and along with it, the unleashing of property developers — is a viable solution to the country’s housing ills.

Much of the analysis and argument of Against Landlords is on the mark. Bano lays out a history of housing and land ownership, which demonstrates how the treatment of housing as a financial investment has much deeper roots than the current crisis. The book also credits housing movements and campaigners for their relentless pressure in winning legal concessions, and sets out how both the law and the state are central to the housing emergency.

But while the book offers a clear historical account of how land and housing became financial assets, Bano’s analysis of financialisation warrants further exploration. In an intervention into the debate surrounding the book published in The Big Issue, Bano went so far as to argue that ‘financialisation’ — or at least ‘international finance capital’ — is not the cause of the housing crisis. The point seemingly being made here is that finance capital based in Britain has no more incentive to provide good housing than finance based abroad.

However, this argument is at risk of neglecting an important factor. This is that the financialisation of housing more generally — treating homes and land as financial investments — is a determining cause of the modern housing crisis. This is a process that sees investors, landlords, and other buyers acquiring houses to use as investments — and together bidding up prices. As the supply of money for buying housing is ‘elastic’, the numbers can increase further in a self-perpetuating process.

The academic evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the financialisation of housing is a fundamental cause of this tendency — because it substantially increases rents and house prices. While the growth of landlordism can be seen as a critical part of this wider financialisation process, there is a risk here of overstating its role, given that a variety of different actors look to cash in on rising house prices and rents and bid each other up.

To be sure, Against Landlords does ultimately turn its analysis towards — and point the finger at — real estate developers and speculators, rather than focussing solely on landlordism. Yet a question mark remains here, over the matter of whether the growth of landlordism is the dominant driver of the crisis, or whether private landlordism is simply one component of a housing system in which finance has become the main driver.

The phenomenon of the ‘death of the landlord’ also forms a central part of the book’s historical argument. Here, Bano takes as his starting point a real trend that occurred in the 1970s — that of declining landlordism (but not, perhaps, of ‘death’). It is clear that many people, on the right and elsewhere, felt that landlordism was on its way out by the 1970s — and, perhaps surprisingly, that many on the right believed that this trend was an acceptable, or even a positive one. (A contemporary parallel can be found in the deluge of articles we are now seeing in the mainstream media predicting ‘the end of the landlord’, a phenomenon blamed on any number of exaggerated or imagined causes: renters’ rights laws, clampdowns on landlord tax avoidance, growing tenants’ complaints, or simply ‘wokery’.) 

The salience of an ‘aspirational’ politics of homeownership helps to make sense of why people on the right felt that a housing sector without landlordism was acceptable. But while landlordism did indeed decline in this period, Bano’s book goes so far as to suggest that it had been virtually abolished and was in its death throes. While the decline was significant, there is a risk here of overstating the degree of change achieved during the social-democratic (but still capitalist) post-war years.

According to the official figures, the private rental sector accounted for over 11 percent of homes by the late 1970s, around half the size of the private rental sector today, and larger for example than the number of Housing Association homes today. Perhaps more strikingly, in the late 1970s, the private rental sector still remained larger than the Buy to Let industry is today (according to recent Bank of England estimates). The postwar economy had reorganised ownership — substantially increasing both homeownership and council housing — but landlordism remained alive and in only a gradual (but non-terminal) decline.

Writing in 1975, in a key text on the Marxist politics of housing, Simon Clarke and Norman Ginsburg argued that private landlordism had declined, but also that the struggle between tenants and landlords was ongoing in Britain. They also argued that Labour legislation in the 1960s had sought to provide a ‘fair return’ for landlords, and that the Tory government of the early 1970s had sought to strengthen the ‘relative position’ of landlords. That private landlordism has become a far worse problem (and significantly larger in scale) since the 1970s does not take away from the reality that landlordism was a central part of the housing problem throughout the twentieth century as a whole.

It is true that the trend we see from the 1970s is one of housing becoming increasingly treated as a financial investment, particularly through the liberalisation and commercialisation of mortgage lending. This development was followed by the dismantling of council housing and the resurgence of private landlordism from the 1980s onward. The revival of the private rented sector was therefore preceded by the beginning of the financialisation of land and housing, becoming a crucial part of this phenomenon only later. Acknowledging this fact can leave the Left better placed to understand these trends and organise for radical change.

Bano’s book offers a clear and unapologetic account of the injustice and insecurity inflicted by private landlordism on the history of British land and housing, while pointing to the work of renters’ unions and campaigners in fighting for a fairer housing system. The book’s concluding suggestion, that legal reform and the tenants movement can lead the way in resolving the crisis, is a clear enough outline of a leftist strategy for housing. 

However, this suggestion risks sidestepping the vital question of political power and the state. Without confronting these wider institutional questions, social movements alone are unlikely to be able to extract more than piecemeal concessions resembling the Starmer government’s recent Renters’ Rights Bill. Even in a world without landlordism, as long as land and housing are treated as capital, and as assets to be used to generate returns, there will be little scope for a housing system built around public need.