Photo Credit: Kunal Chaudhary
28th August 2025
Rent is a social relation where a small class of owners extracts wealth from a bigger, non-owning class without producing anything in return. Landlords make their living from owning, not from working. Their growing wealth comes from rising land values. This means that their interests aren’t in protecting the environment or securing housing for working people, but in extracting as much value as possible from both.
Given this, it shouldn’t surprise us that what we see around the world isn’t a growing green conscience on the part of landlords, but the tightening grip of private property ownership squeezing poor people dry while worsening ecological breakdown. Indeed, plenty of cases show that when climate disasters strike and housing becomes scarce, landlords will seize the moment to increase profit at the expense of everyone else.
In the United States (US), major floods triggered by heavy rainfall or hurricanes led to steep rent increases for low-income (often minority) renters, while more expensive housing was largely unaffected. In those cases, government aid didn’t appear to cause the spike (in fact, federal disaster assistance had no effect on rents), which suggests that landlords simply exploited the crisis by demanding higher payments from desperate tenants.
In California, thousands of renters reported illegal rent hikes after losing their homes in the fires earlier this year. Even when laws banned rent gouging, enforcement was weak. Families already devastated by fire were priced out, while property owners made bank. The same happened after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, where speculation surged in the aftermath of destruction and displaced families were forced into unsafe housing.
These patterns aren’t limited to disaster zones. In many apartments, indoor temperatures climb into unsafe ranges because landlords refuse to install or permit cooling systems. Reporting by Current Affairs revealed landlords across the US are actively lobbying against legal requirements for air conditioning while tenants swelter in lethal summer heat. In Jakarta, real estate developers pumped groundwater to support luxury condos, causing the ground to sink and floods to worsen. The city responded with a massive sea wall to shield high-rent developments while leaving everyone else to their own devices.
In the United Kingdom (UK), surveys have found that tenants are far less likely than homeowners to have buildings or contents insurance, leaving them exposed if disasters strike. Over 53% of renters lack contents insurance (compared to under 10% of owners), and they depend on landlords to pay for building insurance. This means natural disasters often wipe out a renter’s belongings with no compensation, while the landlord gets paid by insurance.
A report by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies showed that renters are structurally disadvantaged on energy efficiency. In the US, renters occupy smaller, less efficient units on average, and are far less likely than owners to have had weatherisation work done:
“[P]roperty owners have little incentive to improve the efficiency of their units because they often do not pay for utilities. Indeed, nearly 90% of renters pay for their own electricity use, and two-thirds of those with gas heat pay for those costs. As a result, property owners do not directly benefit from investing in efficiency retrofits, while tenants would benefit but lack the authority – and typically the resources – to make improvements themselves.”
But even when steps are taken to improve energy efficiency, it’ll often serve landlords first. In Toronto, a prominent corporate landlord announced major energy retrofits in the name of climate responsibility. Shortly after, tenants faced higher rents and many were evicted. The company even admitted in one of its annual reports that efficiency upgrades were aimed at lowering operating costs and attracting higher-paying renters:
“For our existing assets, we are focused on how our Net Zero Action Plan can reduce emissions without sacrificing returns … We are retrofitting buildings across our portfolio which will reduce operating costs over the life of the asset, lead to higher rents, and attract like-minded tenants”
Still, some will argue that landlords have the capital to finance climate adaptation while tenants do not. This is true, but it misses the point that the capital itself is accumulated through rent extraction. Money that could be used by the tenants themselves to prepare for climate impacts is siphoned into private hands, then partially reinvested in ways that keep tenants powerless and vulnerable.
Then there’s the idea of the ‘good landlord.’ Yes, some do keep rents low and maintain the properties. But this doesn’t change the underlying power structure. At any moment (especially during natural disasters), rents can be raised, maintenance can be neglected and tenants be evicted. Individual goodwill isn’t a substitute for systemic change.
Rent extraction also ties economies to endless growth. Rent income floats above actual production, so economies are forced to grow perpetually to sustain it. That pressure feeds ecological breakdown. Instead of stabilising resource use, economies double down on expansion. No matter how nice they might be as individuals, landlords are part of a system that demands expansion even at the cost of ecological collapse.
A possible rebuttal here is that landlords are essential to the housing system. Yet in Singapore the state built and subsidised public flats, and today nearly 80% of residents live in government housing. As a result, the city has both high homeownership and low homelessness. Likewise, in Vienna over 40% of all housing units are social housing (about half municipally owned, half non‑profit cooperatives). In 2023 the average rent in Vienna was only about €10.50 per m², versus over €30/m² in London or Paris.
Beyond big-city public housing, other non‑profit models also show promise. Community land trusts keep land in collective hands and cap resale prices of homes. By 2021, the Champlain Housing Trust in Vermont managed 2400 apartments and 635 homes, providing housing for around 7000 people. It provides everything from financial counselling to subsidised retrofits for its residents. Because the land is leased and any value gains are shared with the community, Champlain’s model stabilises costs and prevents outside investors from buying property to quickly resell it at a higher price (known as speculative flipping). Similar models exist elsewhere. In the UK, The London Community Land Trust has currently built 34 homes but plans on building 500 more in the next ten years. In Puerto Rico, the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust (the first in LATAM and the Caribbean) was established in 2004 as a way of resisting gentrification, securing collective legal tenure of 200 contiguous acres of land in perpetuity.
Cooperative ownership is another path forward. In Sweden, for instance, millions of people live in tenant-owner co-operatives where members democratically control their buildings, and usually may only sell to new owners approved by the community. This prevents speculative flipping and keeps homes affordable over generations. These co-operatives often invest heavily in insulation and solar, because all residents benefit from lower bills and greater comfort (rather than just one absentee investor reaping any return).
To be sure, transitioning away from this system of property won’t solve all problems overnight. It requires political struggle against entrenched real estate interests and market ideology, and careful policy design. But the verdict is clear. The struggle for environmental justice cannot be separated from the struggle for fair housing. The working class will continue to face the worst of climate disruption so long as landlords control access to housing. Floods and fires won’t create green landlords, they’ll create higher rents and higher inequality. The only path forward is one that takes housing out of the hands of financial speculators and places it under democratic control.
Written by Kevin Picado.
The WCCA 