Demand #11: Abolish property rights on all...

Demand #11: Abolish property rights on all non-owner-occupied homes

Property rights on residential houses should be restricted to those wholive in them. Homes which the owner does not live in must be eitherexpropriated and added to the local social housing stock, or sold to someone who does want to live in them.

From the recent March for Homes, to protests against the international property fair MIPIM, resistance to evictions in Spain, or the E15 Mothers fight for decent housing, it’s clear that the housing crisis is reaching breaking point. Between 2002 and 2007, median house prices rose by around 65% in Britain, 44% in Ireland, and between 30-40% in the USA, Canada and Australia (see page 218 of this book). From 2010-2014, UK average monthly rental prices increased by 11.5%, hitting an all-time record high by September 2014. At the same time, the EU has estimated that more than 4.1million people are homeless across Europe.

There is a crisis of affordability in housing, as increasing prices coupled with falling real wages and increasing job precarity make it more and more difficult to pay your rent, let alone to actually own your own home outright. The common-sense analysis is that this crisis is all about supply and demand - there are just too many people and not enough houses. Indeed, the housing and homelessness charity Shelter has suggested that ‘we will never fix the root causes of the problem unless we build enough decent, affordable homes’. We do need more, better quality housing; and it’s also essential that we stop the availability of work being the only thing that determines what counts as a viable place to live (see Demand #3, Demand #7 and forthcoming demands). There needs to be popular control over where new houses should be built. But fundamentally, the contemporary housing crisis isn’t about a lack of houses - it’s a social crisis caused by the increasing financialization of our homes.

In the first instance, research conducted by The Guardian has estimated that more than 11 million homes across Europe are empty, with over 700,000 in the UK alone - enough to house the EU’s homeless population more than twice over. These empty houses can often be in places where there isn’t much work (because of mass deindustrialization and a shift towards post-Fordism) - but this raises bigger questions about the link between work and the right to have a wage. As well as the scarcity and increasing concentration of work in particular metropolises, the thing that is leaving 4.1 million people out in the cold is that homes aren’t homes - they’re properties .

This housing crisis isn’t just about supply and demand. An increasingly small number of people own an increasingly large number of properties, leaving the rest of us left to fight over the (overpriced) scraps. The right-wing broadsheet The Telegraph recently ran a special section entitled ‘Do I need a pension when I’ve got five buy to let properties?’. We need to confront the fact that house prices are driven up because they are treated as a financial investment vehicle - a place for rich people to store their money.

We need to stop houses being treated as tools to make the rich richer. The ownership of residential property should be limited to the people who live in them. If there is a tenant already renting the house, the house will just be expropriated from their landlord; their tenancy will be transferred to the local council, which will ensure the tenant’s rent is set at an affordable level at or below what they were previously paying. Holiday cottages which aren’t suitable to be used as someone’s main home can be turned into holiday cooperatives so lots of people can enjoy them. All other properties will have a period of phase-out during which they can be sold to people who will live in them (and during which their value will continuously depreciate), after which they will be expropriated and added to local social housing stock.

Members of Plan C MCR

17th March 2015

housing social housing march for homes e15 mothers evictions housing crisis financialisation demand luxury communism