Lenin on housing

Theses for a Law on the Confiscation of Apartment and Tenement Houses

(November 20 , 1917 )

1) All land (urban) shall become the property of the nation. 

2) Houses which are systematically let to tenants shall be confiscated and become the property of the nation. 

3) Owners of houses that are not let to tenants shall, pending the decision of the Constituent Assembly, remain in possession without any change in their rights of ownership. 

4) Several-months compensation (2 to 3 months) to owners of confiscated houses who can prove their …{unfinished} 

5) Rent shall be collected by (whom?) the Soviets (paid into the current accounts of the Soviets). 

6) Building committees (the trade unions + building offices) shall ’take charge also of house supplies (fuel, etc.). 

7) Rent payment to come in force immediately. 

8) The building and house committees shall come into force gradually as and when they are set up by the trade unions and the ’Soviets. 

9) The heating of the houses and their normal upkeep shall be the duty of the house committees and other institutions (trade unions, Soviets, fuel departments of the town council, etc.).

Lenin

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Engels on housing

The so-called housing shortage, which plays such a great role in the press nowadays, does not consist in the fact that the working class generally lives in bad, overcrowded and unhealthy dwellings. This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it. In order to make an end of this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class. — What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as the result of the sudden rush of population to, the big towns; a colossal increase in rents, a still further aggravation of overcrowding in the individual houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live in at all. And this housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it does not limit itself to the working class but has affected the petty bourgeoisie also.

Engels
 

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