Valkyrian government proposes abolition of rent
The move will significantly curtail private property ownership in Valkyria
Tove Jakobsdóttir (she/her), Chief politics writer
Monday, 14 November 2022
Austral | Valkyrisk | Austurmál | Fjellspråk | Läntinen
Ravneby — The Valkyrian government will abolish landlordism, Prime Minister Steve Bennett said in a speech from the Utøvende on Monday. Following months of interparty negotiations, the governing Alliance of Social Democrats have agreed to specific legislation that will abolish rental housing ownership in Valkyria.
Entitled the Housing Act 2022, the legislation will authorise the national government to expropriate all private property in Valkyria that is either actively being used as rental housing or has been used for that purpose at any time since 2019. The bill also sets a timeline to ban all rental housing by 2026.
The move to nationalise housing in Valkyria has been a long-term goal of the Socialist Party, which gained piecemeal reforms from former Prime Minister Margaret Harrison, whose homelessness legislation came with significant backing from leftists in the Alliance. With the proposed Housing Act, Bennett says homelessness will become nonexistent by the decade’s end in Valkyria.
The Alliance, a bloc of democratic socialists, social democrats, pirates, and green leftists, reached an agreement in principle in July to nationalise housing but its implementation was a matter of debate for months, culminating in a November breakthrough that will see the Socialists achieving total victory on the issue. Following fierce protests against landlands in Ravneby, Gullkysten, and other Valkyrian cities, rent could be a thing of the past.
Under the terms of the Housing Act, the national government will raise taxes to expropriate private housing, maintain the properties, and end monthly rent payments for all tenants as late as January 2026. By then, no person in Valkyria will be legally allowed to rent out property to another person. The legislation will also indefinitely extend an eviction moratorium that was implemented during the GID-20 pandemic.
Anyone in Valkyria who is currently or in danger of becoming homeless will be able to register at a housing office or online for a home within 50 kilometres of their place of usual habitation. The bill will also allocate funding for additional social workers to visit homeless people and help them find shelter.
Monday’s announcement by the prime minister was met with vociferous criticism from the New Conservative Coalition, the Liberal Party, and Valkyrian business leaders, with Liberal leader Jason Sullivan calling the proposed legislation the “death of capitalism” in Valkyria. Some Coalition politicians, such as New Right leader Nicole Chancellor, took to Stream to compare the leftist government to Bruuma.
Political observer Ryan Danielson told the VKS that the Housing Act will be the Valkyrian government’s biggest challenge yet on an issue that has “animated” the conservative and liberal opposition, “For a bill like this, which is the most socialist bill to have ever stood any real chance of passing, we will see how far left this government will be able to go in a historically conservative nation such as ours.”
However, University of Ravneby politics professor Njála Sigurdsdóttir says that Valkyria has been undergoing a left-wing shift in political balance dating back to Patrick Beckley’s presidency in the early 2000s, “The Valkyrian people are reacting to what they see as the excesses of capitalism – inequality, homelessness, and an increasingly out of reach cost of living. This change has been happening for a long time, and we’re finally seeing it come to a head.”
Financial markets reacted negatively to Bennett’s announcement, with the real estate industry facing the biggest blows. Pacifinext was down 4.86% at closing, but housing companies on the index were down a staggering 29.57% on average. Despite the negative financial reaction, Bennett is expected to move forward with the proposed law, as he has long called the stock market an “unacceptable gauge” of political support.
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