[Diggers350] Off-Guardian: What’s REALLY Behind The War On Home Ownership?

Tony Gosling tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Sat Jul 31 22:27:31 BST 2021



WHAT’S REALLY BEHIND THE WAR ON HOME OWNERSHIP?

https://tlio.org.uk/whats-really-behind-the-war-on-home-ownership/ 
<https://tlio.org.uk/whats-really-behind-the-war-on-home-ownership/>31/07/2021 
<https://tlio.org.uk/author/tony/>TONY GOSLING 
<https://tlio.org.uk/whats-really-behind-the-war-on-home-ownership/#respond>LEAVE 
A COMMENT


<https://off-guardian.org/2021/07/31/whats-really-behind-the-war-on-home-ownership/>Becoming 
a “Nation of Renters” is clearly a big part of the New Normal



Kit Knightly

The incipient “Great Reset” is a multi-faceted 
beast. We talk a lot about vaccine passports and 
lockdowns and the Covid-realated aspects – and we 
should – but there’s more to it than that.

Remember, they want you to 
<https://off-guardian.org/2020/11/12/own-nothing-and-be-happy-the-great-resets-vision-of-the-future/>“own 
nothing and be happy”. And right at the top of 
the list of things you definitely shouldn’t own, is your own home.

Emacs!



The headlines about this have been steady for the 
last few years, but it has picked up pace in the 
wake of the “pandemic” (as has so much else). An 
agenda hidden on back pages, behind by Covid’s 
meaningless big red numbers, but perhaps no less sinister.

You can find articles all over the net talking up renting over owning.

Last month, for example, Bloomberg ran an article 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-17/america-should-become-a-nation-of-renters?sref=2o0rZsF1&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_content=view&utm_source=twitter>headlined:


America Should Become a Nation of Renters”

Which praises what they call “the liquefaction of 
the housing market” and gleefully expounds on the 
idea that “The very features that made home 
buying an affordable and stable investment are coming to an end.”

The Atlantic published 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/why-its-better-to-rent-than-to-own/618254/>“Why 
Its Better To Rent Than Own” in March.

Financial pages from 
<https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/when-renting-is-better-than-buying-a-home?r=US&IR=T>Business 
Insider to 
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2019/11/30/six-reasons-renting-can-be-smarter-than-buying/?sh=57e709e41a0c>Forbes 
to 
<https://finance.yahoo.com/news/6-reasons-why-not-buy-162104151.html>Yahoo 
and 
<https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-01/personal-finance-here-s-why-renting-is-smarter-than-buying-now>Bloomberg 
again are filled with lists titled 
<https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1112/reasons-renting-is-better-than-buying.aspx>“9 
Ways Renting is Better Than Buying”, 
<https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/reasons-renting-a-house-is-better-than-buying-one-2019-8?r=US&IR=T#:~:text=Renting%20also%20allows%20you%20a,keeping%20up%20with%20other%20expenses.>or 
similar.

Other publications go more personal with it, with 
anecdotal columns about ignoring financial advice 
and 
<https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/reasons-ignoring-advice-stop-renting-buy-home-2021-7?r=US&IR=T>refusing 
to buy your home. Vox, never one to sell their 
agenda with any kind of subtlety, 
<https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22597947/homeowner-nimby-affordable-housing-local>have 
a piece titled:


Homeownership can bring out the worst in you

Which literally argues that buying a house can make you a bad person:


It’s the biggest thing you might ever buy. And it 
could be turning you into a bad person.

So what exactly is the narrative here? What’s the story behind the story?

The short answer is fairly simple: It’s about greed, and it’s about control.

It almost always is, in the end.

The longer answer is rather more complicated. 
Major investment firms such as Vanguard and 
Blackrock, along with rental companies such as 
American Homes 4 Rent, are buying up 
single-family homes in record numbers – sometimes 
entire neighbourhoods at a time.

They pay well over market value, pricing families 
who want to own those homes out of the market, 
which forces the housing market up whilst the 
Lockdown-created recession is lowering wages and 
creating millions of newly unemployed.

Of course, this is motivating people to sell the houses they already own.

People all across America have been saddled with 
houses worth less than they bought them for since 
the 2008 economic crash, and are eager to take 
the cash from private investment firms 
<https://therealdeal.com/national/2021/04/13/institutional-investors-higher-material-costs-lead-to-rising-home-prices/?irclickid=TYIz%3AeSy6xyLRwNxiAS6PRWLUkBUNiz1H0mY1c0&irgwc=1&utm_source=impact&utm_medium=af>paying 
10-20% over market value. Combine an economic 
recession with a created housing boom and you 
have a huge population of motivated sellers.

Of course, many of these sellers don’t realise, 
until it’s too late, that even if they attempt to 
downsize or move to a cheaper area, they may be 
<https://www.marketplace.org/2021/04/13/institutional-investors-are-stiff-competition-homebuyers/>priced 
out of the market completely, 
<https://www.vox.com/recode/22407667/home-sales-boom-rent-housing-single-family-rental>and 
forced to rent.

As such, in the last year, the private investment 
share of single-family home purchases is 
estimated to have increased ten-fold, going from 
2% in 2018 to over 20% this year.

As more and more people are forced to rent, of 
course, rental properties will be in higher and 
higher demand. This in turn will drive the cost of renting up.

Market Watch has already reported that, in the 
last year, rent has 
<https://www.marketwatch.com/story/shock-rents-rising-three-times-as-fast-as-official-inflation-figures-11627397608>increased 
over 3x faster than the government predicted.

This problem is likely to get worse in the near future.

Last night, Congress “accidentally failed” 
<https://thehill.com/homenews/house/565699-house-democrats-scrap-vote-on-bill-to-extend-eviction-ban>to 
extend the Covid-related eviction ban.

Which means, this weekend, while Senators adjourn 
to the summer homes they probably don’t rent, the 
ban will officially end and a lot of people are 
likely to have their 
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/evictions-loom-after-biden-congress-fail-to-extend-ban-congress-joe-biden-covid-white-house-americans-b1894255.html>houses 
foreclosed or their landlords kick them out.

The newly empty buildings will be a feeding 
frenzy for the massive corporate landlords. Who 
will descend on the banks like starving hyenas to 
snap up the foreclosed properties for pennies on 
the dollar. Just like 
<https://www.marketplace.org/2016/03/08/what-happened-all-those-foreclosed-homes/>they 
did in 2008.

None of this is any secret, it’s been 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/magazine/wall-street-landlords.html>covered 
in the mainstream. Tucker Carlson even did 
<https://video.foxnews.com/v/6258491904001#sp=show-clips>a 
segment on it in early June.

The Wall Street Journal headlined, back in April, 
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-the-buyer-might-be-a-pension-fund-11617544801>“If 
You Sell a House These Days, the Buyer Might Be a Pension Fund”, and reported:


Yield-chasing investors are snapping up 
single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices

However, since then, something has clearly 
changed. The propaganda machine has kicked into 
gear to defend Wall Street from any backlash.

No better example of this shift can be found than 
The Atlantic, which ran 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/single-family-landlords-wall-street/582394/>this 
story in 2019:

WHEN WALL STREET IS YOUR LANDLORD
With help from the federal government, 
institutional investors became major players in 
the rental market. They promised to return 
profits to their investors and convenience to 
their tenants. Investors are happy. Tenants are not.


and this story 
<https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/blackrock-ruining-us-housing-market/619224/>last 
month:

BLACKROCK IS NOT RUINING THE US HOUSING MARKET
The real villain isn’t a faceless Wall Street 
Goliath; it’s your neighbors and local 
governments stopping the construction of new units.

Going back to the 
<https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blackrock-bubble>Vox 
well we have:

Wall Street isn’t to blame for the chaotic housing market

Which ran just a few days after the Atlantic 
article, and is practically identical.

Both these (oddly similar) articles argue that 
Wall Street and private equity firms can’t be 
blamed for buying up houses, and that the real 
problem is the lack of supply to meet demand.

You see, all the “selfish” people who already own 
homes (they did say it makes you a bad person) 
are blocking the construction of new houses, and 
thus driving up the cost of property through scarcity.

This has been a logically flawed argument around 
the housing market for decades.

That there aren’t enough houses for people to buy 
is patently absurd when the US census data says 
that there are over 
<https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf>15 
million houses currently standing empty. That’s 
enough to house all of America’s roughly 500,000 homeless people 30x over.

There’s plenty of houses, there’s just not enough money to buy them.

The reason for that is the same reason the 
California has massive 
<https://www.npr.org/2021/05/25/999969718/high-cost-of-los-angeles-homeless-camp-raises-eyebrows-and-questions?t=1627743305413>“homeless 
camps” in its major cities, and that so many 
people are having to become renters instead of 
owners: 
<https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/>wage 
stagnation.

For decades now, wage increases have lagged 
behind increases in the cost of living. In the 
1960s one full-time job could afford a decent 
standard of living for a family of four or more. 
These days both parents work, sometimes multiple jobs each.

It was huge amounts of financial de-regulation 
which created this situation. So, whether you 
believe Vox’s BlackRock apologia or not, one way 
or another Wall Street very definitely is to blame.

But this isn’t just about money. It never is. 
Just as the war on cash isn’t just about 
efficiency, and the environmental push isn’t just 
about climate change. Ditto veganism. It’s about 
control. Just like vaccines, lockdowns and masks.

It always comes down to control.

It’s an oft-used cliche, but no less true for 
that, that homeowning “gives people a stake in 
society”. A family-owned house is a source of 
security for the future and something to leave 
your children. It is also sovereignty and 
privacy. Your own space that no one else can control or take away.

In short: A homeowner is independent. A renter is 
not. A renter can be controlled. A homeowner can not.

It’s the same reasoning behind the way working 
people were encouraged to take out loans and 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pEFX0wSIIE>become 
debt slaves. If you limit people’s options, if 
you make them rely on you for a roof over their 
heads, you have control over them.

There’s a great article about this situation 
called 
<https://gen.medium.com/meet-your-new-feudal-overlords-e18709541d61>“Your 
New Feudal Overlords”.

Under Feudalism, land wasn’t owned by the working 
class, but provided to them by landed barons, 
hence the term “Land Lord”. If you disrespected 
your Lord, or broke his rules, or he perceived 
another peasant/farm animal/crop would be a 
better use of the land, he could take it back.

Essentially, the behaviour of serfs was kept in 
check by their reliance on the nobility for a 
place to live. That’s very much the dynamic they’re going for here.

Rental agreements can be full of any terms and 
conditions the landlord wants, and the more 
desperate people get the more of their consumer rights they will sign over.

Maybe you’ll agree to smart meters which monitor 
your internet or power-usage habits, and then 
sell the data to behavioural modellers and viral marketers.

Maybe you’ll have to agree to certain power 
limitations or water shortages in order to “fight climate change”.

Maybe it will get worse than that.

Maybe they’ll go full Black Mirror style 
corporate dystopia. Maybe, through affiliation 
programs, the mega-equity firm which owns your 
rental house has ties to McDonald’s, and as such 
will require you to not eat at any competing 
fast-food franchises, or demand you observe at 
least ninety seconds of Disney advertisements per day.

Maybe it will be as simple as including vaccine 
status in the tenancy agreement, making it 
impossible for the unvaxxed to find a home.

Maybe they just want to make poor people miserable.

After all, the super-wealthy have got all the 
money they could ever need, and all the luxury 
they could ever use. Their living standards are 
as high as physically possible. So maybe the only 
way they can keep “winning”, is to start driving 
the living standards of us proles down.

No air travel. No vacations. No going out at all. 
Live in a <https://www.tinyhouse.com/>tiny house, 
or 
<https://www.timeout.com/news/how-pod-houses-are-providing-a-way-out-of-homelessness-072021>a 
pod. Eat 
<https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/08/if-we-want-to-save-the-planet-the-future-of-food-is-insects>bugs. 
Get rid of 
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51366123>your 
car. Rent 
<https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2021/jul/20/renting-fashion-can-be-green-argue-clothes-renters>your 
clothes. Or 
<https://www.capetownetc.com/property/why-millennials-are-choosing-to-rent-instead-of-buy-their-furniture/>your 
furniture. Pay taxes <http://x/>on sugar. 
And<https://www.dumptheguardian.com/society/2021/jul/13/alcohol-caused-740000-cancer-cases-globally-last-year-study> 
alcohol. And 
<https://www.dumptheguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/04/uk-health-professions-call-for-climate-tax-on-meat>red 
meat.

They’ve been very clear about this. They’ve told 
you about the Great Reset and the 
<https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22387601/smart-fridge-car-personal-ownership-internet-things>Internet 
of Things. That’s the plan.

You won’t own a house. And you’ll be happy
or 
else the mega-corporation you’re forced to rent from will kick you out.
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