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A response to Hampton on Housing

  About four years ago, I published a short, relatively low-effort video on why landlords are unnecessary middlemen in the housing industry. Some guy named Hampton rolled out a 9-minute video in response to it. This addresses his response, and better analyzes land lording while explore options we can use to make housing affordable. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/06/260282186/eight-reasons-why-the-rent-is-too-damn-high ) To begin, the single article Hampton sourced for the entirety of his video is an opinion article written in 2014, by Aboubacar Ndiaye for NPR. Not even that, it was a comment on another article that was turned into an article. Its reliability is very questionable, and the author doesn’t have qualifications However, a 2004 FAIR study concluded that "NPR’s guestlist shows the radio service relies on the same elite and influential sources that dominate mainstream commercial news and falls short of reflecting the diversity of the American public....
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On Landlords and Housing - A revolutionary communist analysis

  Introduction No, the solution isn’t “just build more houses”, and landlords are still parasitic middlemen that profit from a necessity. Let’s revisit a topic I briefly covered four years ago, this time exploring it in much greater depth. This video examines the issues that landlords and property management companies face regarding housing prices and offers a perspective on housing from a Marxist point of view. I’ll also attempt to respond to some arguments raised in response to that video, keeping it as concise as possible. Of course, with a touch of urbanism.   On the Housing Question   I want to begin with a brief clarification of the role landlords have in the capitalist system.   Engels wrote a series of articles in the 1870s, right after the Franco-Prussian War, discussing the dialectic between the petit bourgeoisie’s and Proudhon’s perspectives on the housing crisis. Workers were flooding into towns across Germany, while large-scale demolitions of...
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