The Housing crisis is about creating a two class society-us and them.

By the end of each month, I have spent most of my waking hours robbing Peter to pay Paul to ensure I have a roof over my head for the next month. My intellect, my personality and my emotions are rind and pulp from the juicing and squeezing neoliberalism has done to me during the previous thirty days.  

Photo by Samuel Steele on Unsplash

By the last days of the month, I am at a point of surrender but it is a personal defeat an individual reckoning, a nothing to history’s ledger books.

Capitalism is a 24/7 dance marathon with few breaks and no prizes except to live another day if you make it through the last one.

Weary is a word that springs to my mind- along with a fragment from a poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

You do not need to be an economist or a historian to know that our era is an epoch of enormous class inequality that won't go away through incrementalism.

I live- as do most of you in penury. It kills us bit by bit. It humiliates us and creates a cacophonic symphony of anxieties and fears. It weakens our health. But I think of myself as one of the lucky ones because when I had my heart attack at 42 and cancer at 56- I had more reserves of energy to keep buggering on.   

At least, I tell myself, at 60, I still have a family doctor- except it comes with a catch-22. My doctor lives in a city far enough away from me that I can't afford to see him as often as I should.

But I am still fortunate because- at least for now, my poverty is chronic. After all, I have a roof over my head and still have enough to eat. As long as that lasts, there is hope because it allows me the basics to continue the work I do to preserve and expand- the legacy of my dad by writing more books and essays. That is my hope, my rock, my reason to get up in the morning. Other people have their reasons to stay afloat in these terrible times. But more of us are drowning in this affordability crisis, which denies the right to a purposeful existence that includes love and tenderness.

2024 is a new Gilded Age, where affordable housing is extinct in Britain, Western Europe, Canada and the USA, and renters are a permanent underclass.

From this year to last, rents in England rose on average 13%. Why are rents going up? It is to feed the need for yearly higher returns of investors or the gluttonous avarice of an individual landlord- who has five properties as their retirement golden goose.

Londoners pay an average of 40% of their income to keep a roof over their heads. A recent housing study in Canada showed minimum wage workers were at least five dollars an hour shy of income to afford rental prices in 2023 in all but 3 Canadian cities. So, if you are wondering why food banks can't keep up with demand, there is your answer. In Germany, a land once known for rent controls, 1.6 million Germans pay over 50% of their income to housing.

Politicians who should have the backs of tenants don't. They have too much skin in the landlord game, including owning multiple homes that will make them a hefty profit upon sale. Over 100 MPS at Westminster earn income from owning rental property. The House of Lords is packed with peers made rich from rent.

In Canada, 40% of its MPs own outright or have partnerships in rental properties. Local politics is no different because city mayors & council members are, in many cases, landlords. You can't expect a housing crisis to end if your politicians profit from the crisis or have friends and family profiting from our misery.

Is there a solution to the housing crisis? Of course! But it requires us to lose our fear of total financial ruin and ridicule by the press or our employers.

A 21st-century social and economic revolution doesn't require blood on the streets. Only unflinching resolve to change how we live and prosper is necessary, like the 1945 post-war consensus which built a Welfare State. Unless you accept that the root cause of the cost of living crisis is the economic system of neoliberalism, you will always have a cost of living crisis regardless of the political party you elect to govern your country.

Neoliberalism dismantled the welfare state and replaced it with a scaffold of inequality where our democracy hangs like the corpse of a wrongfully convicted prisoner. We walk by the place of its hanging each day as we grub for our living in an age of diminished expectations. Only taking ownership of our working-class past will allow us to own our future outright rather than renting it for an inflated price from the 1%.

Thanks for reading and supporting my Substack. Your support keeps me housed and allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. June was a shit month so a yearly subscription from you will cover much of next month’s rent which is due tomorrow. I hate asking but it is an SOS. Your subscriptions are so important to my personal survival because like so many others who struggle to keep afloat, my survival is a precarious daily undertaking. The fight to keep going was made worse- thanks to getting cancer along with lung disease and other co-morbidities which makes life more difficult to combat in these cost-of-living crisis times. So if you can afford to join with a paid subscription either by the month, or year or as a super subscriber or even giving someone a gift subscription, it is greatly appreciated. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it is all good too because we are in the same boat. Take Care, John