[Vwoolf] Rent or own?

Jeremy Hawthorn jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no
Fri Jul 3 10:15:52 EDT 2020


Property and race: a few recollections.

1. When I was in Austin, Texas 1994-5, we had friends who lived in a 
house built in the mid 1930s. There was a condition on purchase of the 
house (lease? deeds?) that no-one of African descent was allowed to be 
in the house during the night. Ironically, as we are now understood to 
be all of African descent, this should arguably have applied to all 
human beings.

2. As a student at Leeds University, UK, in the 1960s I remember talking 
to two Kenyan postgraduates, one of whom was the novelist James Ngugi, 
later Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o. They told me that on the day after Kenya got 
independence from the British there were still places in the centre of 
Nairobi that were open only to white people. At that time it was still 
legal in the UK to bar people from clubs and shops on the basis of 
colour; when students in Leeds demonstrated against this they were 
attacked as vandals and communists.

3. When Professor Eldred Jones from Sierra Leone, author of /Othello’s 
Countrymen/ (1965), came as visiting professor to Leeds, it was 
extremely difficult to find accommodation for him because of his colour.

So when people mock political correctness, they should be reminded of 
what things were like a mere half century ago.

Jeremy H


On 03.07.2020 16:01, Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf wrote:
> I hope I never said that there was “little difference between leasing 
> and owning except for legalities”, tho’ I will say that a 999-year 
> lease seems to me very close to owning a freehold.  (I am not alone in 
> holding this opinion.)  And of course I was only talking about England 
> & Wales – not even Scotland – far less the US.  (Perhaps I should have 
> been talking about Scotland – which I’m not equipped to do – since the 
> Ramsays’ house is in Skye!)
> The question I was raising was how better off you were if you had a 
> lease on a property as opposed to a rental agreement.  It’s impossible 
> to answer unless you know the individual terms of the leasehold v. the 
> rental agreement. Why did the Woolfs move from 52 Tavistock Sq to 
> Mecklenburgh Sq?  Why, when they moved, were they still holding onto 
> 52 TS? They were hamstrung by an expiring lease.
> (Oh, and I misspelt “peppercorn”.)
> After all, I *did* say that the British were obsessed with *owning* 
> property.  Do I have to say also that it’s a way of making money 
> long-term?
> Stuart

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