UK Rural Rental Housing Scarcity, Pick Your Villain: January 2022, It’s STR Landlords

street view of home being let as a short term rental
A short-term rental property in Surrey, rustic, though not necessarily charming. Still, a fine base for a rural holiday with little concern that it's one less affordable home for a struggling local.

What are we to make of an equivalence between airBNB-type short-term holiday rentals (STRs) on one hand, and the social housing shortage on the other? A United Kingdom charity asks us to consider such an equivalence on its way to pointing out the housing plight of rural communities.

In fact, the Campaign To Protect Rural England (CPRE) is making a (significant?) point about the estimated number of short term holiday rental houses in England — some 148,000 — compared with the number of rural residents on the social housing waiting lists — in the range of 176,000.

If some magic could convert short term rentals to social housing, it would seem that much of the problematic shortage of low income housing in rural England would be solved.

CPRE goes further to suggest that at the current rate of affordable housing construction, without any such pie-in-the-sky conversion of free market holiday rental housing into social housing, it will take 121 years to clear current waiting lists.

What’s this all about? A suggestion of some form of forcibly-legislated equivalence? SRT landlords offering high-priced rentals for a fraction of the year could, at an unusually socialist stretch of credulity, be required by government to take on social housing qualifiers for the entire year1.

Fairness would demand that governments need to make up the shortfall in SRT earnings. And governments, particularly recent neoliberal ones, have demonstrated over and over again that they will act in bad faith if required to chase free market prices2.

So what’s the real point here? CPRE makes some income-generating suggestions involving taxation of SRTs, but these fall far short of meaningful solutions to the affordable housing problem.

To affordablehousingaction.org, the invasion of the STRs is evidence that a vibrant, self-interested free housing market is capable of inventing and monetising a money spinner such as the STR out of internet thin air in a few short years. Without any directed malice, this has profoundly threatened a nation’s stock of affordable rural housing.

It is arguably proof that government responsibilities towards providing housing for low and no income citizens must be initiated, as well as perpetually maintained, away from the free market. Read more at LocalGov.co.uk: Short term holiday rentals ‘crippling’ rural communities, warns charity

Footnotes

  1. For one example, try: Short Term Rental Disease: Europe Uses COVID As An Affordable Housing Cure
  2. Try: Irish Govt Strengthens Voice of Housing-Poor. How? Adding More Voices