We live in a new Gilded Age, and we are on the outside looking in.

You do not need to be an economist or a historian to know that our era is an epoch of enormous class inequality. 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.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

The world's wealthiest nations abandoned their many to enhance the wealth of corporate and individual landlords. The rise of fascism is not a coincidental occurrence during this housing crisis but a symptom of it. Yet centrist pundits and politicians whose pockets are rich with property assets refuse to ameliorate the rise of intolerance, racism, anti-migrant rhetoric and right-wing populism by immediately ending wage poverty or housing insecurity.

It is not bad planning, natural disasters, the climate crisis, or Putin causing this struggle for people to pay their rent or keep up with their mortgages. It is outright greed from the 1% sanctioned by governments. If that is not corruption, on the scale of the mafia what the hell is it?

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 unionised workers are striking in larger numbers than in years previous or 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.

The housing crisis must be a permanent feature in a neoliberal society unless you change what is the value of housing which is to build safe, sustainable communities rather than next eggs for the top 10% of income earners.

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 also allows me to preserve the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith. A yearly subscriptions will cover much of next month’s rent. 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 join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. But if you can’t it all good too because I appreciate we are in the same boat. Take Care, John.