Landlords offering mental health check-ins aren’t going to solve the rental crisis

6 comments

1. I’ll probably get downvoted to hell, but sod it. I really feel this country was a lot better when there wasn’t this constant banging on about mental health issues.

2. Home scalpers are a cancer to our economy. They are leaches who, just like ticket scalpers snatch up as much of a supply as possible and then rent it back through the nose. They create no work, no product, just unfettered greed and laziness as they turn other people into their breadwinners.

   Labour have been in power nearly a year and have done fuck all to address this other than tinkering around the edges.

   4 years left to build 1.5m Kier. The Labour councillors here just refused 550 homes in defiance of the planning officers who were minded to approve it. It’s now at tribunal. You call this “change”? The only “change” has been the further increase of rents by 10% over the last 12 months, Kier.

   Pull your fucking finger out, it’s throttling the economy as we have nothing left to spend on anything Kier.

3. Landlord “Awww, are you sad that your living conditions are so poor? Are you sad that your monthly rent is way higher than my monthly mortgage payment on this place?”.

   Renter “Yes”.

   Landlord “Tell me, how does it make you feel?”. 

4. One of the biggest failures of New Labour was housing. We’ve lost millions of council homes since the 1980s and they built less than Thatcher:

   >The official data shows that the Blair and Brown governments built 7,870 council houses (local authority tenure) over the course of 13 years. (If we don’t include 2010 – the year when David Cameron became PM – this number drops to 6,510.) Mr Copley has contrasted this figure with the record of Mrs Thatcher’s government, which never built fewer than 17,710 homes in a year.

   https://fullfact.org/economy/who-built-more-council-houses-margaret-thatcher-or-new-labour/

   Given that the Blair/Mandelson faction is firmly back in control, it’s hardly surprising there are no plans to build council houses to address the rental crisis—they’re far too close to developers and landlords to risk undermining those interests by actually helping working people.

   This, from the very party that once built 300,000 council homes a year in the 1960s and 70s, back when it was still a worker-led, social democratic movement.

5. That seems as useful as the office gossip being my mental health support colleague. 

6. Landlords are never going to solve the rental crisis, period. While there will always be a demand for rental properties, most private landlords do not care about their tenants’ wellbeing. They are solely in it for the money. A landlord’s register and an independent regulatory body might help to some degree, as it might keep some of the worst landlords out of the system if checks are stringent. A better alternative would be for more council properties available for renters, with the council responsible for acting as the landlord. At least that way you could hope properties were fit for human habitation and that rent would be reasonable.

Comments are closed.