More than a century after Mary Barbour’s rent strike changed history, Glasgow is once again in a housing crisis. Reanne Sutton and Raymie Kiernan trace how our homes became commodities – and ask what it would take to put people back at the centre of housing.

By Reanne Sutton & Raymie Kiernan | Photo by Thomas Cornwallis

From rent strikes to Right to Buy: a century of shifting control

By Reanne Sutton

Over a century ago, the Glasgow Women's Housing Association helped spark a housing revolution. As the first world war began, thousands arrived into the city to work in shipyards and munitions factories, sending demand for housing soaring. During this period 90 percent of the housing stock was owned by private landlords and the law was firmly on the side of the landlord.

In February 1915, landlords decided to collectively raise all rents by 25 percent. With many men away at war, it was left to the women to organise. Led by Mary Barbour, the South Govan Women’s Housing Association mobilised 20,000 tenants to strike. Rent strike posters were plastered on windows, bailiffs were blocked from evictions, and court actions sparked street demonstrations.

Eventually, the UK government relented and passed the 1915 Rent Restriction Act – freezing the rent to 1914 levels unless landlords could prove that improvements were made. This was the first comprehensive European enactment controlling rent.

The legacy of the strikers was to change the living conditions of millions of people during the war, and it set the tone for the changes at home. After the war was over, the beginnings of council housing emerged as a response to privately-rented slums – and to be able to house returning soldiers. Council housing ramped up massively again after the second world war for similar reasons.

In the 1960s, the Parker Morris Committee set standards for minimum floor and storage space in new social housing. Their housing design even considered that residents would be able to move furniture around their homes. These principles were adopted by private developers, setting a benchmark for liveable homes.

By 1975 in Glasgow, a mere five percent of the housing stock was privately owned, while 54 percent was socially owned.

But by 1980, the winds of neoliberalism were firmly blowing. The Thatcher government introduced the ‘Right to Buy,’ setting off a mass sell-off of council homes. Liveable housing standards, such as those proposed by the Parker Morris Committee, were quietly abandoned. Private developers ushered in a wave of smaller, lower-quality homes. In 1988, the Housing Act removed security of tenure and rent controls.

Then in 1996, buy-to-let mortgages kicked off a new era of landlordism.

The Glasgow social housing sell-off and its legacy

By Raymie Kiernan

“The really sad thing about the whole issue is that we have sold off for next to nothing something that is not ours to sell in the first place… Can we really look at our kids now and say they’ll be okay that there will be a council house for them in the future? This is going to come back and haunt us all, believe me.”

These prophetic words from ‘Mary’, a long-standing tenant campaigner in south west Glasgow, were recorded by academic researchers for a paper published in 2005. Mary’s words are food for thought today as the city faces a ‘housing emergency’, declared by the city council last year, 22 years after its leaders shed responsibility for its housing stock.

Mary and others fought against council housing stock transfer for many years until 7 March 2003 when New Labour got its way and 80,000 council homes were no longer under democratic control.

We should all wonder what kind of difference more affordable publicly-controlled housing could make to everyone struggling to meet their rents in today’s expensive rental market. It wasn’t always like this and it doesn’t have to remain this way.

Once, social housing was the norm. Historically, the council in Glasgow was one of Europe’s largest landlords. At the end of the 1970s, council housing stock stood at around 180,000 homes but still the waiting list was over 100,000-strong.

The push to transfer council homes out of public hands had been building. The Thatcher government’s Right to Buy scheme, introduced in 1980, led to over 25,000 homes in Glasgow being sold by the late 1990s. By 2016, half a million Scottish homes had been sold under the policy, but only 163,000 were replaced. Many are now in the hands of private landlords. Councils were legally prevented from reinvesting all profits back into housing, and according to a BBC investigation, homeowners made £2.3 billion in profit between 2000 and 2016.

“Who do you want to run housing?” is a big question, and it was one asked in a survey sent to council housing tenants in Glasgow at the turn of the century. The New Labour leadership of Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Executive was pushing to transfer council housing stock out of public hands.

There was huge opposition to the council housing transfer to the Glasgow Housing Association (GHA) quango, but it was a David vs Goliath battle. On one side was a high profile multi-million pound Scottish Executive-funded campaign, including an expensively produced monthly newsletter and a video dispatched to all tenants. On the other, were tenant and community campaigners with some support from trade unionists.

Campaigners claim that millions of pounds were also wasted by the council until it got the result it wanted. For example, in one tenant survey, a majority said they wanted the council to remain as their landlord. But in the next survey, that option wasn’t available. Still, many tenants made clear they wanted more investment and did not think transferring public housing stock out of public control was a good idea.

A bright future of investment and a £900 million debt write-off was promised if they voted yes. A No vote was simply presented as a vote for poor quality housing, a low level of service, with no investment on offer.

Some said that rather than being an exercise in tenant participation, stock transfer was more like a loaded gun at their heads. There was no tenant or trade union involvement at all in the preparation of the transfer proposals. Instead the elected representatives of tenants and workers were marginalised and ignored.

For years, tenants had received poor service and lack of investment. In the run-up to the ballot the council had suspended repairs due to a lack of money leading to a further decline. When change was presented to tenants, it seemed worth trying; surely it would be better than what they had been suffering. When public service appears as a state of decline, it can be hard to see how transformation can come through public means.

In the end, the fate of a public asset – over 80,000 homes – was decided by only 37 per cent of all eligible tenants who actually voted for transfer, with 27 per cent rejecting it outright. That’s a small number of people to decide the future of public housing in the city.

Yet the idea that the state should provide affordable housing for rent, and that council housing has a social and welfare role, was under attack through stock transfer. Social housing and those who lived in it became looked down upon. The right to safe, decent homes has been chipped away at for decades.

In the 23 years since the social housing sell-off in Glasgow the bright future promised to tenants hasn’t materialised. The city’s housing emergency – with a number of children in 'housing limbo,' homelessness and unaffordable rents – is a legacy of this transfer. Social housing’s welfare role was not only weakened by policy, but stigmatised by design.

Housing as investment: the commodification of our homes

By Reanne Sutton

In 2025, being a landlord is big business. In fact, there are more buy-to-let property companies registered at Companies House than any other type of business. That includes restaurants, bars, or hairdressers (and by quite some margin).

The language around it has become so financialised, you’d almost forget you were talking about a basic human right. Homes instead are now ‘assets’, scarcity is ‘demand’, and rent becomes ‘yield’. With long waits to access social housing, business savvy private landlords now dominate the rental sector.

An interesting development of landlordism 2.0 is that landlords no longer need to live near their property or physically collect rents from tenants. Now, you can simply put your feet up miles away and have an agency to do the leg work for you.

According to Holborn Property Investments: ‘The UK property market has a rich history of providing safe, secure and profitable investment opportunities for overseas investors.’

So, who are our landlords?

Through a Freedom of Information request to Glasgow City Council, the declared home or business addresses of registered landlords have been revealed. While most landlords are registered in the UK, a significant 3,412 are not – as shown in the chart below. The data reflects the addresses provided at the time of registration, which may be a personal residence or a business location, and not necessarily the landlord’s actual place of residence.

**Glasgow landlords are registered in countries outside of the UK**

Many of these countries are also known to be tax havens. This makes it difficult to identify the real owners and, while not illegal, raises concerns about accountability, potential tax avoidance, and money laundering – and can make it harder for tenants to know who their landlord is or assert their rights.

Glasgow City Council refused to provide the postcodes of the foreign landlords properties, or their annual yield, so as to not reveal their identities. But you can find out where your landlord is based by going to the Scottish Landlord Register: landlordregistrationscotland.gov.uk/search

Is it your landlord who ‘lives’ in the Cayman Islands? We’d love to know what you find. Help us build a picture of who owns Govanhill by sharing info about your landlord here:

*You can share your findings by scanning the QR code*

Street-level profits on Allison Street

By Raymie Kiernan

According to the Office of National Statistics in June 2025, the average monthly private rent in Greater Glasgow was £1,239 – a 4.8 percent rise compared to 2024. The average house price in May 2025 was £188,000, up 8.3 percent from the previous year. Both of these increases were above the national average.

But how do these figures compare locally?

To explore rising house prices in the area, I looked at Allison Street, which cuts through Govanhill from East to West – combing back through all entries on property website Zoopla over the past ten years to create a dataset showing sale prices.

It offers a stark, local view of the current state of affairs. There are 97 registered sales on the street in the past 10 years. Not all entries have full data – 19 give only sale price and date, 12 were unavailable – but the available figures still tell a story.

Some flats once listed as one-bedrooms were resold as two-bedroom flats, likely renovated for higher returns. A few three-bed flats later sold as two-bedroom units. Renovation and reconfiguration are clearly part of the profit model.

Across the board, average sold prices jumped from around £96,772 in 2022 to £141,468 in 2024 – a 46 percent increase in just two years.

And then there are the profits:

A two-bedroom bought for £56,000 in 2022 was resold for £150,000 in 2024 – a £94,000 profit in just two years
Another flat purchased for £65,000 in 2022 was resold in 2024 for £115,000, gaining £50,000
A flat listed for £50,000 in 2022 sold for £75,000 the same year, and again in 2023 for £100,000 – doubling in value in a year

Whether are these are intentional ‘flips’ – developers buying and selling for profit – is unclear from the data alone.

Allison Street is not exceptional. It’s indicative. It shows how property has become a vehicle for profit in Glasgow – not security or community, but speculation.

Where Do We Go From Here?

From the 1915 rent strikes to the 2003 stock transfer and the rise of the foreign investor landlord, Glasgow’s housing system has been reshaped around profit rather than people. But it’s not irreversible.

The city has been here before. And it has fought back before. Organised tenants can still shape policy. Rent controls (that were lifted in April) can be reinstated. Public housing can be reclaimed and reimagined.

The question remains: who do we want to run housing?

And more importantly, who is housing really for?