Regulate Landlording

The vast majority of landlords are not being held to account for providing a healthy environment for renters to live. The Healthy Homes initiative has done the bare minimum and loopholes are prevalent. It is still too possible to rent and live in condemned, below code, unsafe, or otherwise harmful rental environments. Landlords who refuse to fulfil even their legal duties are often held to no account, with no recourse available to the renters. Abusive landlords reach no punishment. Capital gains aren't taxed properly.

The government should regulate the wealth and power of landlords by providing a national landlord registry where renters can access information about the landlord's history, and report their landlords for legal violations to a body who will actually do something about it (tenancy tribunal is not enough). Landlords who are repeat violators will have their right to landlording revoked and may have their property siezed by the state. It should be seen as a privilege and a responsibility, not an entitlement for being rich. Houses are everything for people, it is supposed to be their sanctuary and their safe space. Urgent reform is needed to improve the state of affairs in this sector.

Landlords who began in privilege are able to multiply their privilege on the backs of people who choose between renting and homelessness. The power balance between landlords and renters is completely unacceptable and corrupt. Furthermore, due to the inherently privileged position of most landlords, they have no experience and therefore no empathy for the people who are renting, most holding an idea that people become poor due to poor life choices and refuse to acknowledge the systemic imbalances that allow them to hold that viewpoint in the first place. There are too many landlords who are greedy, arrogant, contemptful, spiteful, racist, ignorant, abusive, entitled, heartless, and incompetent.

There is no formal system for processing requests from tenants to access the services they are legally entitled to (such as repairs or administration) and these are regularly denied to renters. Housing is a human right and upholding a system that regularly violates that right on a multitude of levels requires immediate and radical action. The flow on effects for people living in toxic rental situtations (either quality of environment or landlord relationship) is detrimental to the health of the renters. Existing health issues caused by this problem include; depression, anxiety, respitory problems, malnourishment (paying rent and having no food money), injury, domestic violence, and many more.