this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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And what is that fear and insecurity based on? Certainly not reality.
The fear and insecurity is based on reality, in that it often stems from massive inequalities and injustices. The problem is that it's directed at the wrong people.
For example, around where I live, a lot of conservative beliefs are centred around a fear of immigrants, and it's along the lines of "there's not enough housing for the people already here, so we should stop letting other people in". The lack of housing in this area is genuinely at crisis point, and the fear and insecurity arising from that is very much based on something real.
Where the right and the left differ is on who they blame for this. Those with conservative beliefs blame their non-English neighbours. Those with more progressive beliefs blame government decisions that have resulted in too little house building and too many wealthy people buying houses not to live in, but to visit for two weeks a year or to let out on AirBNB.
Obviously I cannot speak to what the situation is in the US, or even necessarily the entirety of the UK. I can just say that in my specific geographic area, it is largely second homes, holiday homes, AirBNBs, etc that are the problem, because the number of houses lost to the residential market through this is pretty much exactly the same as the number of households currently legally classed as homeless (which often means not necessarily on the streets, but being "housed" in hotel rooms and the like). If every single house that is not currently being used to home a family was confiscated from the owners of second homes, holiday lets, AirBNBs, etc and repurposed into residential housing, there would not be a housing crisis here.
Private landlords have, obviously, been raising rents in the last few years, but a big part of that is a matter of supply and demand. If one house gets 50+ families applying to rent it, of course prices are going to rise. We don't tend to have multi-millionaires buying up huge swathes of houses here, with the average property "portfolio" being less than 5 houses. It's simply not possible to get thousands of individual landlords to collude on prices, so if the actual problem - a lack of houses available to live in - was fixed, competition would be sufficient to keep prices under control. If no one is applying to rent a house because they've already found somewhere else to live, prices will drop quickly.
And which of those two views is based on reality?
I think people can have multiple views in their head at once. Since I come from the sciences it reminds me of the quantum physics analogy. In quantum theory you make a state concrete by projecting the state onto a representation. There are many choices each a different way of measuring the system or understanding the dynamics. Some are more useful and less confusing then others when trying to answer a specific question but they are all valid. Where you get to human issues is what conclusions you try to draw based on your analysis of course and that is open for debate.
Rejecting someone else's reality is an important skill for establishing boundaries, but it's also critical to remember that it's still real to them.
While this is, by most measures, objectively the best era to live in for humanity, the orphan grinding machines are still grinding along. There's plenty to fear.
There's certainly plenty to fear but none the stuff those people choose to fear because of their wilful ingnorance is actually real..