Some Very Important News About Generation Rent, i.e You

The total amount of rent paid to private landlords is now more than double the amount of mortgage interest paid to banks by homeowners.

Despite that being very necessary news, sadly it is very uninteresting news, so here is a .gif of rap queen-elect Cardi B to keep you reading for a bit, because our socials guy says our audience really "relates" to her:

Yes, so according to figures published today by the estate agency group Savills, renters paid some £54 billion to buy-to-let landlords in the 12 months to the end of June, 2017, while mortgaged homeowners have been privy to lower interest rates and cheaper loans, meaning – overall – they paid £26.5 billion to banks over the same period of time, i.e. basically half of what renters paid.

Here's a small silent moving animation of Cardi B saying the words "what's poppin'?"

Over a five-year period, the amount paid to banks by homeowners has actually dropped by £6 billion, and the amount paid to landlords by renters has risen by £14 billion, so you can see how there is an imbalance there.

Millennials and younger people in general are often lambasted for their inability to get on the housing ladder, but so much of the housing stock in the country is tied up in buy-to-let housing, and the rental prices we're hostage to are decided by a caliphate of money-oriented landlords who dictate their own market, which – as the numbers prove – swims high above the actual value of the property rented, property-value itself being a fake idea, meaning nobody can save money even for a second, let alone the £100,000-odd needed for a deposit. So, you can see how every single buy-to-let landlord is in some way culpable for the housing crisis as a whole.

Anyway, here's Cardi B with a… I wanna say cheetah? But it could be a leopard. Always hard to tell. Listen: here's Cardi B with a big cat, let's just leave it at that:

The London/young person split for the above news goes as follows: in London, the total paid in rent is four times that paid to owner-occupiers. London rent totalled £20 billion to the end of June, a cumulative figure that has risen 42 percent over five years. Young people as a wider whole are bearing the brunt of the country's rental bill, paying £24 billion to landlords over the last year.

As Lucian Cook of Savills notes: "Fewer people have been able to benefit from the low mortgage rates, and we know that people are renting longer into later stages of life." So today's young people paying too much in rent will most likely turn into tomorrow's middle-aged people paying too much in rent, too.

Here's an ominous .GIF of Cardi B saying the word "forever", a sort of meta-commentary on how long you and I will both be paying rent for:

This is, of course, all Blair's fault, which tends to get forgotten among the war crimes. New Labour policy sort of dusted its hands of housebuilding public policy, leaving the decision-making to the market, which decided to produce a post-WWII record-low number of houses to drive up demand over supply, which in turn made house prices rocket. Pair that with heady days where getting a mortgage was possible and getting a buy-to-let mortgage was even more possible, and you ended up with two bubbles – the housing bubble and the buy-to-let bubble – meaning there's this whole chewy wad of affluent middle-class boomers who own little property empires they won't ever give up, even when the blood dies in their fetid veins and we the youth keep them all warm by paying them half our wages every month while they raise eyebrows at us for buying avocados now and again.

Unrelated-but-slightly-related information: the Blairs own property worth an estimated £27 million!

Anyway, here's Cardi B flexing on a camel, because it's nice to see her career thriving:

Last week's Labour conference saw Jeremy Corbyn pitch the idea of rent controls into the air, citing case studies in Ontario, New York and Berlin that have seen, for instance, landlords being legally restricted from charging any more than 10 percent above the local market rate.

"It's obvious that the entire rental market is dysfunctional and lopsided," a Corbyn spokesperson said, with El Boy promising to double-down on Labour policy first introduced in last year's election manifesto. Unsurprisingly, the Residential Landlords Association didn't like this notional idea even one bit, with a spokesperson saying that lower or controlled rents would be a "disaster for tenants" (somehow????) and that actually holding landlords accountable or in any way responsible would lead to a "reduction in the quality of rented housing available".

Here's Cardi B saying "girl bye" then dabbing:

I don't know. It feels hopeless, doesn't it? Being alive. Feels very hopeless. The entire prospect of it is without hope. The market is just incredibly and unviably busted. Without fundamental top-to-bottom change there's really no way an entire generation won't be lost in a wash of renting, which wouldn't really be a problem if rents weren't gouged by the very landlords setting them, free entirely from any sort of restrictions or controls.

Anyway! That's your news. Here's a video of Cardi B drawing a self-portrait in a top that I fundamentally do not understand the structural physics of:

@joelgolby