Housing News Digest
Housing News Digest
The Tenants' Union Housing News Digest compiles our pick of items from all the latest tenancy and housing media, sent once per week, on Thursdays.
Below is the Digest archive from November 2020 onwards. From time to time you will find additional items in the archive that did not make it into the weekly Digest email. Earlier archives are here, where you can also find additional digests by other organisations.
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Archive
Investment Firms Aren’t Buying All the Houses. But They Are Buying the Most Important Ones.
Elena Botella (No paywall)The median price of an American house has increased by 28 percent over the last two years, as pandemic-driven demand and long-term demographic changes send buyers into crazed bidding wars. ... The Wall Street Journal reported in April that an investment firm won a bidding war to purchase an entire neighborhood worth of single-family homes in Conroe, Texas—part of a cycle of stories drumming up panic over Wall Street’s increasing stake in residential real estate. Then came the backlash, as cool-headed analysts reassured us that big investors like BlackRock remain insignificant players in the housing market compared with regular old American families. The truth is between the two ... (Slate Magazine)
https://slate.com/business/2021/06/blackrock-invitation-houses-i…
# International, Housing market, Landlords and agents.Central West locals take in strangers as housing crisis escalates
Arianna Levy and Micaela Hambrett ABC (No paywall)A perfect storm of booming tourism and a tightening real estate market has created a new class of homeless in regional NSW. They are the paid professionals, with full-time, consistent work, who are finding themselves sleeping in their cars as short- and long-term accommodation becomes increasingly elusive in the current housing environment.
Now, some locals are opening their homes to complete strangers just to keep them off the streets.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-28/locals-taking-in-stranger…
# NSW, Rent, Homelessness, Regional NSW.By Bringing Down Sweden’s Government, the Left Party Saved Rent Controls
Nooshi Dadgostar (No paywall)On Monday, Sweden's Social Democratic government lost a vote of no confidence after it tried to abandon the country's system of collective bargaining on rents. The Left Party was decisive to the defeat — and now, the proposal to introduce market rents has been dropped. (Jacobin Magazine)
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/06/swedish-parliament-government-noo…
# International, Rent, Campaigns and law reform, Housing market.Tenant Organizers Are Fighting Back Against Corporate Landlords... and Winning
Luke Ottenhof (No paywall)From Canada ... Evictions usually happen behind closed doors and individually. That is slowly changing. ... On Easter weekend, at least a dozen cruisers from Toronto Police Service swarmed an apartment building complex in northwest Toronto to enforce the eviction of a single father from his unit. We know about this because organized neighbours and concerned renters stopped the police from evicting him. Faisal Hassan, the NDP Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for the single father’s riding, was on the scene to support the tenant defence. “It was a horrible thing,” said Hassan of the police-led eviction. Hassan eventually helped negotiate for the tenant to stay in his unit and secure a new lease, but it was only possible because organized tenants made sure their neighbour wasn’t evicted in the first place. (Vice)
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyvdea/tenant-organizers-are-fig…
# International, Eviction, Rent, Campaigns and law reform.Berlin May Vote on Expropriating Landlords Amid Tenant Ire
Patrick Donahue (No paywall)Berlin’s local government faces the prospect of being forced to buy out large landlords such as Vonovia SE after activists said they collected enough signatures to get a referendum on the ballot in September. Campaign organizers said on Friday they had more than 343,000 signatures, exceeding what they said was a threshold of 175,000. The milestone was announced at a rally outside Berlin’s interior ministry. Known as Deutsche Wohnen und Co. Enteignen, the movement gained momentum in April after Berlin’s rent freeze was overturned by Germany’s highest court, forcing thousands of tenants to repay rent reductions. The city’s booming real-estate market has sparked demonstrations as once-cheap apartment costs soar in the German capital. (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-25/berlin-heads-…
# International, Rent, Housing market, Local Government.Real estate agents should be the first to be replaced by robots
Jack Derwin (No paywall)Real estate agents are a scourge on humanity, and conveniently one that can be scrubbed from it with the latest technology or, failing that, a good Excel spreadsheet. (Business Insider Australia)
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/real-estate-agents-automation…
# Australia, Landlords and agents.Do millennials really prefer to rent – or have we just been cheated out of a proper home?
Arwa Mahdawi The Guardian (No paywall)Capitalism is reshaping the property market, locking younger generations out of buying somewhere to live and expecting us to be happy about it ... The year is 2070. Nobody owns a home any more; the concept of individuals possessing property has gone the way of the floppy disk. Instead, a few large corporations control all the world’s real estate and people “subscribe” to holistic housing solutions on their iPhone 78X in the same way they currently subscribe to Netflix. You can pay your monthly subscription in billionaire-backed cryptocurrency: BezosCoin, MuskCoin or ZuckCoin. If you default on your housing sub (nobody uses old-fashioned terms such as “rent” any more) you are dispatched to Mars to pay off your debt via indentured servitude in intergalactic Amazon warehouses.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/15/do-millenn…
# International, Rent, Home ownership, Housing market, Landlords and agents, Young people.How the Polynesian Panthers stood up to landlords and their damp rentals
Brad Flahive and Alex Liu (No paywall)From the 1950s, New Zealand’s migrant communities lived in the homes that made up Auckland’s then working-class suburbs of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn.
Sickly mould, rotten floors and poor sanitation were a breeding ground for vermin rather than a habitable home for families. With nowhere else to turn, desperate families asked the Polynesian Panthers to step in. “We would tell these people to pay their rent in a separate account and show the landlords that the rent was being paid, and it would be available to them once they fixed up the property,” recalled Alec Toleafoa ...
https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/business/residential-prope…
# History International, Rent, Repairs, Mould.