The Rent Trap How we Fell into It and How we Get Out of It by Rosie Walker and Samir Jeraj

Description

Deregulation, revenge evictions, parliamentary corruption and day-to-day instability: these are the realities for the eleven million people currently renting privately in the UK. At the same time, house prices are skyrocketing and the generational promise of home ownership is now an impossible dream for many. This is the rent-trap, an inescapable consequence of market-induced inequality. 

Rosie Walker and Samir Jeraj offer the first critical account of what is really going on in the private rented sector and expose the powers which are conspiring to oppose regulation. A quarter of British MPs are landlords, rent strike is almost impossible and snap evictions are growing, but in the light of these hurdles The Rent Trap will show how people are starting to fight back.

Drawing on inspiration from movements in the UK, Europe and further afield, The Rent Trap will cohere current experiences of those fighting the financial burdens, health risks and vicious behaviour of landlords in an attempt to put an end to the dominant narratives that normalise rent extraction and undermine our fundamental rights.

Samir Jeraj is a journalist who specialises in housing and worked as a city councillor. His work on housing has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, Inside Housing and the New Internationalist.

Rosie Walker is a writer and researcher interested in housing, poverty, employment rights and debt. She has worked as a researcher for LSE, University of Bristol and University of Brighton, and as a journalist for The Independent and Third Sector. While writing an MSc dissertation on private renting, she was evicted by her landlord for asking for a new chest of drawers.