Housmans Books presents Isaac Rose and Nick Bano in conversation to discuss the class politics of housing, landlordism, and tenant organization today.

In Isaac Rose’s The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis, the author observes that in cities across the world, gentrification and the housing crisis are facts of life. But how did we get to this point? And is there any way we can fight back. A good place to begin answering these questions, Rose argues, is Manchester, England. Over the last thirty years, corporate developers, rentier capitalists and boosterist politicians have reshaped Manchester in their image, replacing its working-class communities, public spaces and affordable housing with skyscrapers, luxury developments and a private rental market that creates wealth for rentiers and impoverishes everybody else.

The Rentier City traces this story, showing how it fits within the longer history of Manchester. In doing so unveils a larger story of the relationship between capital and our cities, between rentier and rentee, and gives us a blueprint of how fight back against rentier capitalism and take back control of the cities we live in.

Similarly, in Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis, Nick Bano confronts a world where landlords always win and renters pay the price and asks, what can be done? Housing means prosperity and security for some; poverty, precarity and sickness for others. More people live in private rented accommodation than ever before, and rents rise without apparent reason. Homes are smaller every year, and nearly 20 per cent of tenants live in hazardous conditions. Homelessness is at a new high. Yet the government’s only solution is to promote homeownership.

Issac and Nick will be reading from both of their books, discussing the key issues of the housing crisis, followed by a Q&A.