Who needs a landlord? The mainstream media, the government, and the landlords themselves would all give us the same answer. They would tell us that landlords are necessary. They would tell us that landlords provide a necessary service.
What service do they provide?
They say that landlords are the ones who provide the people with homes! Try not to laugh.
Big and small landlords do not build the houses and apartments that we live in. People with real jobs do that—workers in the trades.
The landlords also do not make the household appliances we use. Again, people with real jobs make these. They do not provide us with the utilities and services that we use every day in and around our homes either. Workers make and maintain these systems.
“Big and small landlords do not build the houses and apartments that we live in. People with real jobs do that.”
Similarly to how workers build our homes, our appliances, and provide us with utilities, if there are maintenance issues that need to be addressed, workers who specialize in these fields are the ones to fix them. A landlord almost never does this work, and when they do? We have all seen their half-assed jobs and how much they love covering everything and anything in thick layers of ugly paint. What they actually do in our society is this: the monoplization of lands, buildings, and peoples homes, all for their own profit. Big landlords and property managers make sure that they are able to eat up as many buildings and homes for their portfolios as possible so that their investors, boards, and owners can make billions off of us.
If the government and media are trying to tell us that these landlords provide us a needed service, what alternate reality are they trying to convince us we are living in? In reality, we don’t need landlords. They need us. They need us to provide them with our hard earned wages, so big landlords can sit back and do nothing of benefit for society, or so small landlords can pay off their own bills and mortgages.
“What they actually do in our society is this: the monoplization of lands, buildings, and peoples homes, all for their own profit.”
In some sense, landlords live paycheck to paycheck. That is, they live our paycheck to our paycheck. This cannot continue if we, as a majority, want to flourish and live healthy lives together. We can’t afford to keep having a parasitic class leech off of what we work hard every day for. Change must be made, and this system needs to end as soon as possible. It’s clear that we can’t count on the media to support us, or for the Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party (NDP) to put the government on our side. The media loves to weave stories of Millennials buying their first home at the age of 25 or so. Saying that due to their hard work, they were able to achieve such a feat, and that if we just work hard enough, we too can become home owners. You see, this isn’t a problem of society, the government, or the market, this is actually a problem of the individual, and as individuals, it’s up to us to solve it! (Duh! Silly us, how couldn’t we have seen this!).
“In reality, we don't need landlords. They need us.”
But again and again, what they fail to mention in stories like this is how, in these cases, the majority of the time these people are from well-off families. Their parents are able to help them with no-interest loans, or they themselves are landlords and property owners. This is something that most of us can’t say for ourselves. And then there is the Liberal Party, in which 41% of the recently appointed cabinet members are themselves landlords. But it is known to most people that the Liberal Party is not the party of the working person. Of course they would not reflect us or what we want our future to look like. The NDP is sometimes pointed to as our party, and the alternative we need. We hear this all the time from the NDP’s activists and their community organizations. But, are the NDP really an alternative that will represent us?
The history of the party in power and its policy statements point to this being a fairytale that they try to sell us for votes.
“We ourselves, as workers and tenants, must do the work to change things.”
We ourselves, as workers and tenants, must do the work to change things. We need to get to know our neighbours and what is happening in our communities. Build up our power, form tenant committees in our buildings and our blocks, and lead the fight for the decommodification and socialization of housing. We can, and we will, build a brighter future.