Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis by Nick Bano, In Defense of Housing by Peter Marcuse and David Madden, and Renters Unite! How Tenant Unions are Fighting the Housing Crisis by Jacob Stringer are three very different books that converge on the same truth: Britain’s housing crisis is not an accident but an outcome—a systemic failure rooted in commodification, exploitation, and deliberate statecraft.
There is no shortage of homes in Britain. Not really. The number of dwellings outpaces the number of households, and underoccupancy rates are high. Yet every month the crisis deepens. Rents rise, evictions spike, council waiting lists swell, mould spores multiply. It isn’t a question of scarcity but of power. Who owns the land, who extracts the rent, who shapes the built environment, and for what purpose.
The dominant story is supply: that we just haven’t built enough. It is a beguilingly simple tale, repeated by ministers, columnists, even think tanks who ought to know better. But as Nick Bano outlines in Against Landlords, the data does not support it. We’ve added homes at a faster rate than population growth; we have more homes per household than ever before. What we lack is not bricks and mortar but a housing system geared toward need rather than profit
The origins of the present housing crisis lie not in population growth or a failure to modernise planning laws, but in a political decision taken in the 1980s to dismantle the foundations of public housing in Britain. All three books return, in different ways, to Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy—an epochal shift that transferred over two million council homes from collective provision into private hands, often at steep discounts, with no obligation to replenish the stock.
Thatcher’s Right to Buy wasn’t merely a policy. It was, as Alan Murie’s paper The Right to Buy: History and Prospect makes clear, a structured campaign to hollow out the social rented sector. It wasn’t the legal entitlement that turbocharged sales, but the extraordinary discounts—deliberately targeted at better-off tenants in more desirable areas. Councils were barred from reinvesting the proceeds; the Treasury pocketed the cash. What followed was the mass depletion of public housing, the erosion of relets, and the quiet shift of homes into the hands of private landlords. Social need was residualised. The state now rents back what it once owned. The public pays twice.
Bano identifies this moment as the decisive break. Prior to Thatcher, rents were capped, council housing was widely available, and the private rental sector was in decline. But this was not a system that just failed. Instead it was one that was deliberately demolished. The sell-off was not a policy error; it was a political project. A new class of small landlords emerged, tenants became buyers, and the state took on the role not of provider but guarantor. Thus ensuring landlords could extract ever-growing rents, with housing benefit plugging the gap.
As Marcuse and Madden argue, the housing crisis is not a distortion but a function of capitalist urbanisation. The shift from use value—homes as lived spaces—to exchange value1—homes as investment vehicles—lies at its core. Under financialised capitalism, displacement and crisis are not malfunctions; they are how the system works.
Jacob Stringer’s Renters Unite! documents the human fallout. In his work with London Renters Union, he captures the long tail of Thatcherism. Tenants exiled from their communities, priced out of boroughs, trapped in “temporary” accommodation for years. The legacy of Right to Buy is not ownership but precarity: a system in which secure tenancies are anomalies and even basic repairs become a class struggle.
What Thatcher began, New Labour institutionalised, and the Tories left deeply entrenched. Now, with Labour back in government, the question is whether it will dismantle that legacy, or merely administer it with softer rhetoric. This is why the solution cannot be a nostalgic return to Beveridge-era social democracy. Housing is not just an economic issue; it is ideological terrain. As Bano reminds us, housing-based wealth is now the cornerstone of Britain’s political economy—a “national industry” built on scarcity, extraction, and the quiet violence of rent increases and eviction notices.
To confront this system is to confront the entire post-Thatcherite settlement. Bano’s subtitle—“How to Solve the Housing Crisis”—is slightly misleading. He isn’t offering technical tweaks; he’s naming the root cause: “house-price capitalism,” a rentier logic embedded in law, regulation, and policy. From the Thatcherite assault on rent controls to New Labour’s speculative planning gain regime, the state has reshaped housing into a financialised asset class. Protected by policy, subsidised through housing benefit, and extracted from tenants by legal force.
Bano’s legal critique is sharpest where it exposes how British landlordism is structured through tenancy law. The assured shorthold tenancy, introduced in 1988, became the default form. Enshrining insecurity. Tenancy agreements, he shows, are not neutral contracts but instruments of submission, enabling rent extraction with minimal accountability. Landlord power is juridical: it is codified, enforced, and legitimated by the state.
Marcuse and Madden complement this with a structural analysis. Housing is not just shelter. It is a terrain on which value is produced, circulated, and contested. They expose how capitalist urbanisation turns homes into commodities, displacing those who can’t pay and concentrating wealth among those who already have it.
Stringer adds the everyday: the fear of complaining, the silence after a rent hike, the resignation that mould and cold are normal. These are not psychological quirks, they are political effects. Tenants often don’t know they’re being exploited until they begin to organise.
What unites Bano’s forensic legal analysis with Marcuse and Madden’s structural critique is the insistence that housing cannot be depoliticised. Every home is shaped by struggle: between capital and labour, between landlords and tenants, between the right to profit and the right to dwell. This struggle is not metaphorical. It is encoded in tenancy law, planning frameworks, eviction procedures, and the architecture of state welfare.
Stringer’s account of the London Renters Union exemplifies how that struggle is being made visible. To organise, he writes, is to replace despair with anger and channel that anger into hope. From Glasgow to Hackney, tenant unions are reasserting the idea that housing is a right, not a reward.
Across these books, a shared horizon emerges. Not a return to postwar Keynesianism. Though social housing and rent controls remain vital. But a deeper transformation: decommodified housing, democratic control of land, and a politics that refuses to treat shelter as a market function.
So what’s to be done? Abolish Section 21 evictions—not just pledged but enforced. Build council housing at scale. Not just vague targets but guaranteeing 1.5 million homes over five years, no excuses. Cap rents to prevent profiteering. Higher taxes on second homes. Close developer loopholes. Reform planning to serve people, not portfolios. Above all, shift housing from a market logic to a social one. As Marcuse and Madden write, the point is not to defend the housing system as it exists, but to defend housing as home.
Housing justice is not just about how many homes we build. For decades, spatial planning in Britain has served developers more than communities. The planning system has been hollowed out by austerity, captured by corporate lobbying, and paralysed by a political culture that treats all regulation as red tape. Land is hoarded. Greenfield sites are prioritised for profit. Local democracy is sidelined in favour of “viability assessments” and market logic.
To change that, we need to put spatial justice at the heart of housing policy. That means re-empowering local authorities with planning capacity. It means resisting developments on flood plains and coastal areas already at risk from erosion—not because we are anti-growth, but because we understand that long-term public safety must trump short-term private gain. And while the instinct to prioritise brownfield sites is right, they’re not always suitable: many are poorly located, heavily polluted, or lack the infrastructure to support dense, liveable housing. Retrofitting existing stock is vital—but it cannot meet the scale of need alone. Some hard decisions are unavoidable.
That means confronting the politics of the green belt. Not sacrificing Sites of Special Scientific Interest or ancient woodland, but recognising that much of the green belt consists of scrubland, golf courses, and low-grade farmland. These could support sustainable, publicly owned housing. So the question is not whether to build. But for whom, on what terms, and with what consequences.
Murie’s history makes clear: you cannot fix a crisis of disinvestment with private-sector incentives. Housing associations were a workaround after councils were stripped of funds and powers. Extending RTB to their stock, as the Conservatives tried again in 2015, was a final twist of the knife. Financing discounts with the sale of “high-value” council homes and accelerating social polarisation.
That means confronting powerful interests: landlords, developers, asset managers, politicians whose fortunes depend on rising prices. It also means challenging cultural norms: that homeownership equals security, that renting is transient, that housing is an individual investment rather than a collective need.
If Murie’s long view teaches us anything, it is that policy made in the name of aspiration often masks attacks on universality. The postwar settlement saw housing as a right. Right to Buy reframed it as a reward. Restoring housing as a social good means reckoning with decades of deliberate political vandalism.
At the heart of the crisis is a moral one: that we have allowed the right to live to be conditional on paying tribute. That children grow up in damp flats while absentee investors (which includes MPs) accumulate equity. That we pretend there is no alternative when, in fact, there are countless ones—Vienna’s social housing, Berlin’s expropriation vote, and the tenants organising across Britain.
This is not just about shelter. As all three books make clear, housing shapes everything else: work, health, education, community—even hope. It is the terrain on which a new politics might be built. Not just to manage the crisis but to finally abolish it.
Footnotes
- The use value of housing refers to its function as shelter, as a lived space. Where people cook, sleep, raise children, and form community. It is housing as home. But under capitalism, the exchange value. What a property is worth on the market—often dominates. This contradiction lies at the heart of the crisis: when investment potential trumps human need, displacement and exclusion become systemic, not exceptional. Housing becomes a site of profit rather than a condition for life ↩︎
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