Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the private rental market in Britain as characterized by increasingly acrimonious conflicts between an ethics of individual responsibilisation through property investment, and moralising calls for an end to 'parasitic' rent seeking and a universal 'right to a home'.

Paper long abstract:

With the decline of Western welfare states, investment is no longer a marginal game for the rich. As governments promote the virtues of the fully responsibilised subject, property investment has become both a middle-class status symbol, and for many, a necessity to secure income in old age. At the same time, lack of affordable housing especially in cities has led to ubiquitous 'housing crises', as increasing numbers of renters compete for a dwindling number of available homes. The resulting conflicts are commonly framed in strongly moralizing terms, as private landlords are portrayed as 'parasites', 'vampires', and 'greedy profiteers', whose self-interested rent-seeking is seen as a direct cause of widespread homelessness and hardship. At the same time, however, small-scale landlords are often only marginally more financially secure than their tenants, having sunk their modest savings into mortgaged property they stand to lose at the slightest of missteps. With the decline of the mediating role of the state, private renting is therefore increasingly characterized by two competing moral paradigms: an ethics of personal responsibility for one's financial future comes to clash with calls for a universal 'right to a home'. This paper explores the resulting conflicts in Britain, where an army of small-scale 'buy to let' landlords faces off against an even bigger army of renters. It forwards the argument that in the age of financialisation, moral imaginaries of productive vs. 'parasitic' capital, which have historically characterized anti-Semitic tropes, become individualised and diffused into everyday encounters, with serious consequences for social cohesion.