Rent. Joe Collins
that renters do not destroy what is not theirs and that they leave the place in decent condition. But, just like the horror stories of tourists who have been duped by shonky operators in holiday destinations or caught out by the fine print in insurance policies, the housing rent issue is also more complicated than it might first seem.
The UK-based homeless charity Shelter conducted a tenant survey in August 2017 that found around a quarter of a million women in England had been offered the opportunity to substitute sex for rent in the previous five years, with 140,000 being propositioned in the previous year alone.10 This survey prompted media reporting that brought some of the sordid details of these experiences to light. Evictions for refusing to have sex with landlords and the lowering of rent in exchange for sex are two examples.11 Journalists went on to conduct undercover investigations, impersonating prospective tenants replying to advertisements posted by landlords online that used coded language to imply a sex-for-rent arrangement. More cases of sexual harassment were revealed by these investigations in both the United Kingdom in 201912 and by similar investigations in the United States in 2020.13 In the case of the United States, a survey conducted in May 2020 by the National Fair Housing Alliance of more than a hundred fair housing organizations found that 13% registered an increase in complaints about sexual harassment since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020.14
The executive director of the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women remarked in April 2020 that there had been more cases of sexual harassment of tenants by landlords reported in the last two weeks than in the previous two years.15 Renee Williams, a staff attorney with the National Housing Law Project, said that ‘landlords have all the leverage in the landlord–tenant relationship and in these types of situations they especially prey on women who are vulnerable, who are housing insecure, have bad credit or who don’t have anywhere to go.’ Williams went on to claim that ‘We’ve already seen that the pandemic is exacerbating a lot of systemic issues and sexual harassment targeted at tenants by landlords is likely to be one of these issues.’16
Rent strikes are another example of systemic social issues flaring up during the pandemic. As the name suggests, rent strikes are coordinated refusals to pay rent with the aim of putting pressure on landlords to address problems to do with the rental arrangement. There were calls, for example, for coordinated rent strikes to begin on May Day 2020 across the United States, with catchcries like #CancelRent and #CantPayMay doing the rounds on social media.17 Democratic Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez publicly endorsed the proposal, claiming that ‘People aren’t striking because they don’t feel like paying rent; they’re striking because they can’t pay rent.’18 Organizers of the May Day rent strikes in New York claim that while rent strikes are usually aimed at getting landlords to improve conditions for tenants, these are intended to prod lawmakers into offering up rental assistance to renters struggling in the course of mass unemployment during the pandemic.19 In the week prior to May Day, 3.8 million Americans became unemployed, joining the 30 million who had lost their jobs since the pandemic started.20
Across the Atlantic, rent strikes have been organized in London, Dublin, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome and Athens throughout 2020.21 Mortgage holidays and a moratorium on evictions are some of the policy measures that have been implemented in the United Kingdom as a means to deal with mass unemployment in the midst of the pandemic. Even with these measures in place, there have been instances reported of eviction notices being served that come into effect as soon as the moratorium ends. Tenants of 170 privately rented apartments in Hackney, East London, were served eviction notices by their landlord, Simpson House 3 Limited, in June 2020. The mayor of Hackney, Philip Glanville, called them ‘revenge evictions’ that targeted tenants who had signed an open letter calling for rent decreases for those hit hardest by the pandemic job losses.22 The billionaire property entrepreneur John Christodoulou has been identified as the key stakeholder behind the evictions and who is also the person responsible for funding the purchase of 75,000 care packages that have been delivered to the homeless and struggling families in the areas of London where his properties are located.23
University students have also coordinated rent strikes across the United Kingdom in late 2020. Their grievances include being treated as ‘cash cows’ by universities in the midst of a pandemic where in-person teaching and campus life is limited. Cambridge student Laura Hone claims the colleges ‘are so rich they absolutely have the means to make rent cuts and ensure staff are not laid off . . . yet they continually put profit ahead of the welfare of students and staff’.24 Hone went on to say that ‘the education system should prioritize the welfare of students and staff, but universities are not going to come to this conclusion on their own. Students have to make them listen and rent is the most powerful leverage we have.’25
While the basis of housing rent is simply the fact that people require housing to live, and that those who do not own it must procure it, these examples demonstrate there is nothing simple about the matter. In the case of the sex-for-rent scandal, gendered violence and the power structures that facilitate it seem to be aggravated by the financial hardships caused by increasing unemployment during the pandemic. Those calling and organizing rent strikes are doing so out of desperation, facing the very real prospect of deteriorating living conditions due to the pressures of having to pay the rent. It is clear also that there are financial imperatives constraining the benevolence of landlords, who might themselves be shackled to mortgages. The debtor, staring at an outstretched hand awaiting money they do not have, is probably not overly concerned about whether the appendage belongs to a financier or a rentier. What appears as a simple matter of payment for the use of housing is undergirded by several issues that extend beyond the individual actors to their societal context with very real and immediate consequences for all involved in the rental relationship.
While rent remains an income to landlords, it has also come to apply to lots of different types of property. Like any word, the meaning of ‘rent’ depends upon the context of its use. But unlike most other words, rent has become the subject of contention in economic theory, whereby its usage by those concerned with the subject matter of economics is loaded and requires some understanding of what is at stake in defining rent. Put simply, rent either must relate to land or it does not. Each leads to a different path for understanding what rent means today. This chapter is about working through some of these tensions, particularly in relation to this initial problem, of the relationship between rent and land. The next section looks at how and why rent is enjoying something of a renewal in interest across the social sciences and popular discourse.
Introducing the new ‘-ization’ of the 2020s
If ‘globalization’ was the overarching process occupying social scientists in the 1990s, ‘neo-liberalization’ took that title in the noughties before being replaced by ‘financialization’ in the 2010s. So say critics of the scholarship on financialization. The discourse, some claim, has lost its conceptual coherence, becoming so fragmented that, ‘to the degree that it is excessively vague and stretched, it is an increasingly nebulous and even, arguably, unhelpful signifier.’26 Similar concerns about the usefulness of the concept of neo-liberalism have been raised by some who claim that ‘the conceptual confusion outweighs the constructive debate around the term’s meaning and that there is insufficient consensual core of shared understanding to justify keeping the term.’27 In spite of these criticisms, or perhaps because of them, those urging caution for expanding studies of old descriptors for ‘new’ variants of capitalism are some of the loudest among the chorus of those advocating the next one – rentierization.28
Rentier capitalism is the latest stage of capitalism, according to this growing body of scholarship. To take one recent definition of the concept, rentier capitalism is a ‘system of economic production and reproduction in which income is dominated by rents and economic life is dominated by rentiers’. This system is not just one dominated by rents and rentiers, it is ‘in a much more profound sense, substantially scaffolded and organized around the assets that generate those rents and sustain those rentiers’.29 Rent, according to this account, is ‘payment to an economic