The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.

Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.

Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defense, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.

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And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.

Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.

Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realized, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.

And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent. “Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.

Now, though, many Western countries are transforming into “rentership” societies — where citizens have plenty of income to enjoy video games or tend to houseplants, but can never accumulate their own brick-and-mortar assets. The broader effect may ultimately resemble a modern form of feudalism, where institutional ownership concentrates control over housing.

If these problems transcend demographics, young people are particularly threatened here. When I ask my students if they feel confident about buying a home here in Southern California, they rarely answer affirmatively. In a recent Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, housing ranked as the third most important issue overall, just behind inflation and health care. No wonder: nationally, homeownership for people under 35 has fallen steadily since the Great Recession, and is now half that of over 45s. And, to be clear, this is not due to changing priorities, as two-thirds of millennials still yearn to escape to the suburbs.

All this has a predictable number of knock-on effects: starting with wealth accumulation. With property now so expensive, a situation hardly helped by Blackstone and the rest, American home owners have a median net worth over 40 times that of renters. It’s not hard, here, to see the political implications of this economic divide, with renters tending to favor Leftist policies such as rent control and housing subsidies. To put it differently, a class of permanent renters seems tailor-made for fomenting class warfare against an ever-shrinking number of owners.

Indeed, this is precisely the factor that’s pushed an obscure socialist named Zohran Mamdani to the verge of becoming the mayor of America’s largest and most important city. Mamdani’s “cost of living” campaign — based on rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets — seems to some Leftist pundits as a potential path back to power. And why not? As one recent poll found, a majority of people under 40 embrace socialist principles, even as 70% of adults no longer believe the American Dream is even attainable.

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This politics of bitterness is arguably exacerbated elsewhere too. The only way many can now buy homes is by relying on the classic feudal formula — “the funnel of privilege”. In the US, after all, Millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. In high-price markets like Los Angeles, close to 40% of loans rely on family money for qualification, up from 25% in 2011. For the losers of this economic lottery, resentment is bound to follow.

Of course, it’d be wrong to blame all this on Wall Street or the City. Many forces contribute to higher home prices. That includes immigration — especially the kind of open-door policy faced by Britain in recent years — as well as land-use policies that restrict development. Yet adding big capital to the mix deepens the assault on middle-income aspirations, especially when investors are especially eager to snatch up single-family homes. That, it goes without saying, does much to harden even moderate hearts to free-market ideas, especially when balancing housing with other priorities means that even something as basic as childbearing is now thrown by the wayside.

Nor does the situation look likely to improve in the medium term. As the industry journal Private Equity Real Estate estimates, investors could control as much as 40% of US housing stock by 2030, with similar trends visible in Australia and elsewhere. So pervasive is the trend, in fact, that some lawmakers, including in California, Washington and Georgia, have sought to limit purchases by large real estate outfits. Yet as the radical social theorist Barrington Moore wisely noted half a century ago, “no bourgeois, no democracy”. And if such tweaks are enough to save either remains decidedly unclear, as the stumbling masses look to take revenge.

But the question above was actually first asked a century ago by Noel Skelton, arguably the most important Conservative thinker you’ve never heard of. Skelton’s general radicalism and social purpose helped to defibrillate a party whose electoral future seemed terminal. But in his focus on property inequality, he has much to a teach a government currently grappling with a distorted and stratified housing market. And this is an issue which is increasingly animating voters: new UnHerd polling shows a majority believe house prices need to come down, rising to around three-quarters among 18-34-year-olds. Skelton’s faith that conservatism was not the cause of, but the solution to this inequality has much to teach his successors today.

The Twenties (the last one) was a decade of general tumult and crisis. A newly-enfranchised working-class electorate was contending with a dark economic depression, and Conservatives needed to convince it of the continuing relevance of their ideals. Skelton, a major in the Great War and later a minister in the Scotland Office, was in his forties when he first entered Parliament in 1923. Nonetheless, he was a member of what older Tories pejoratively called the “YMCA” — a group of younger MPs who would cut their teeth in the age of universal suffrage.

Indeed, that was precisely the question confronting the Conservative Party in the Twenties: what would conservatism mean in the context of mass democracy? The Left had clarity about its purpose. As Skelton put it, the strength of socialism was that it was “making an intellectual appeal at the very moment when the craving for mental nourishment [was] so universal”. In the aftermath of a period of war and upheaval, Labour was offering a vision for the country. The Right could not afford to fail to do the same. In an attempt to answer this question, Skelton wrote a series of essays for The Spectator — essays which have a strong claim to being the most important the magazine has ever published. “Constructive Conservatism” — originally four articles written between April and May 1923 and later collected as a pamphlet — was Skelton’s attempt to offer “a democratic articulation of conservatism”. The “master problem of the new era”, in his mind, was the discrepancy between the “political status and educational status” of the British people and their “economic status”.

While the British public was now entirely franchised and widely educated, property ownership specifically remained the preserve of the few, and many lived in conditions of acute economic insecurity. Consequently, British society had become “lop-sided” and “unstable”. And this lop-sidedness threatened the legitimacy of a political order based on capitalism, as well as the shared sense of obligation between different social groups which had underpinned Disraelian one-nation conservatism. Labour’s solution to these societal conflicts was socialism, state ownership and redistribution; what was the Conservative Party’s?

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“To make democracy stable and four-square” was the goal for Skelton. And his means for achieving it was his most famous coinage: “property owning democracy”, a vision of society in which the wage earner had “property and status”, and in which private property would serve as a vehicle for the moral and economic development of the individual. Far from his ideology dying out in a democratised age, Skelton argued, property ownership would make conservatism and democracy mutually supportive. The teetering “stability of the social structure” would have a new prop. And it would also teach responsibility, self-sufficiency, and pride — values which inculcate a one-nation sense of shared obligations, and which recoil from state dependency. For a still-rigidly hierarchical party, it was a remarkable intellectual and ideological innovation.

Skelton was the first to formulate what has become a guiding ideal of 20th century Britain. Property ownership — and home ownership specifically — is one of our most widely endorsed and deeply ingrained aspirational values. Every major party is ostensibly committed to boosting the number of homeowners in the UK. Indeed, the Labour Party is currently the most ambitious on this score: Keir Starmer has said he would pursue a homeownership target of 70% if elected. Property ownership commands such wide support because its value to society transcends partisan interest: it strengthens both capitalism and democracy, two things that all those in the political mainstream want to nurture and preserve in one combination or another.

But Skelton’s essays also helped to change British conservatism, bursting the assumptions of an aristocratic bubble to create space for the dynamic, constructive forces of the postwar. While his name is largely forgotten, his influence was pronounced. Churchill appreciated “the force of our conservative theme” when drawing attention to the differences between a “personal property owning democracy”, as advocated by Conservatives, and socialist state ownership. “Our objective”, Sir Anthony Eden declared to the 1946 Party Conference, “is a nationwide property owning democracy” — not “the concentration of ownership in the hands of the state”, but “the distribution of ownership over the widest practicable number of individuals”. Harold Macmillan went further than anyone in making Skelton’s ideals a practical reality. For him, “of all forms of property suitable for such distribution, house property is one of the best”. As housing minister, he built 300,000 a year, and it was his logic which resulted in election posters boasting that voting Conservative had produced “New homes for a million folk”.

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The property owning democracy was given new meaning in the Eighties by Thatcher. For her, it meant transferring property away from the state to individuals and families via the Right to Buy scheme. She paid tribute to Macmillan and “the practical way in which he made conservative philosophy a reality for the average person in Britain”, but instead of adding to the already significant portfolio of the state, Thatcher committed to dispersing it amongst the British public. Her legacy was to transform the psychology of a constituency of former social housing tenants, producing millions of proud, self-sufficient property owners with a renewed faith in both capitalism and democracy. They rewarded her and the Conservative Party at the ballot box.

Since then, however, conservatism has lost its way. It has committed the mistake of presuming that the party of property should be the party of the already propertied. Yet the vitality of our democracy — and the continued relevance of the Conservative Party — depends on making property ownership an attainable aspiration for a wide cross-section of the population. Instead, Conservatives have concerned themselves with feathering the nests of existing homeowners at the expense of the aspirant ones. Starting with Thatcher herself, Conservatives have failed to ensure a steady supply of new homes, house prices have exploded, and homeownership rates have accordingly declined, particularly among the younger generations who want to see house prices fall.

Houses have come to be seen not merely as homes but as scarce “assets” which appreciate in value for existing owners but which are thus necessarily less and less accessible to younger generations. Instead of owning their own home, younger working-age people are transferring their wealth to older homeowners in the form of rent. One hundred years on from Skelton’s articles, the status of the property owning democracy today is one of decline. Skelton’s vision has become perverted — no longer a stabilising ideal, but a destabilising symbol of inequity. How can young people support capitalism when they are unable to become owners of capital? How can a sense of intergenerational obligation be sustained when younger cohorts appear to be denied the economic opportunities of previous generations? Currently, property ownership is undermining both democracy and conservatism, not reinforcing them, stratifying society into mutually resentful camps along economic lines.

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There is always a risk that Conservatives fall back upon tired or hackneyed articulations of their philosophy — usually a reheated, pastiche Thatcherism — rather than reimagining it to address the challenges of the present. At the present moment, this would be an error with existential implications. But history gives cause for hope. The force of Skelton’s ideas shook conservatism out of its sclerosis and made it relevant in the democratic era. Who is going to take up Skelton’s mantle and steer the party out of its current crisis?

Michael Gove – a passionate Unionist and, that rare thing, a genuinely intellectual politician — resembles Skelton in more ways than one. His new plan to cut through the jungle of lease holding interests exhibits some of the ambition required. And there is no shortage of parliamentary ginger groups sprouting up that resemble the “YMCA” of the interwar years which provided the party with so much fresh thinking, and to which Skelton, Eden and Macmillan all belonged. But it took two decades before Skelton’s vision for the country percolated to the top of his party. Conservatives today cannot afford to wait that long for an intellectual reinvigoration.