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Introduction
The Political Economy of the Private Rental Sector

In 2015 I started regularly to meet private tenants in Dublin, Ireland, as an activist with the Dublin Tenants' Association. The issues coming up for tenants will come as no surprise: high rents, eviction and poor-quality housing. But there were some surprises too. The tenants were more diverse than one might expect. It wasn't just more vulnerable cohorts who were experiencing these issues, but people from many different backgrounds. From high-skilled migrant workers to lone parents from Dublin's disadvantaged communities, private rented housing seemed to be generating problems across the board. But what surprised me most was the sense of unfairness that characterized tenants' experience of private rented housing. This was especially true of long-term renters, those in their forties, for example, but was shared by nearly all the tenants I met in those years. Tenants were angry and frustrated. They felt powerless. They felt that legislation didn't protect them, that landlords could act with impunity, and that the whole private rented sector was rotten. As a seasoned political activist, I wasn't all that used to finding such a receptive audience for my politics. But in the case of private rented housing, tenants needed no convincing that the housing system systematically favoured property owners, and that any progress for tenants would require radical change.

In those years, the fact that Ireland was experiencing a dramatic decline in homeownership was only starting to be understood. The debate around 'generation rent' hadn't really taken hold. My experience when talking to Dublin's private renters signalled a broader societal shift that was taking place, not just in Dublin but across many advanced economies. Across most countries, the private rental sector (PRS) had been in continual decline throughout the twentieth century, becoming a marginal tenure. Through a combination of state intervention to support the expansion of social housing and homeownership and economic growth, fewer and fewer households depended on a private landlord to meet their housing needs. The issues that had been at the heart of housing politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: rack renting, evictions, chronic overcrowding and deplorable conditions, seemed to fade from view as the PRS dwindled. Tenant unions, and their favoured tactics, especially the mass rent strike, gradually became a matter for the history books. As far as housing politics went, the issues that mattered to homeowners and, to a lesser extent, social housing residents, dominated.

In different ways, and with great variation across jurisdictions, the homeownership and social housing tenures offered households the opportunity for residential stability, to put down roots, and to have a stake in their communities and cities (Forrest & Hirayama, 2015). We shouldn't romanticize the achievements of the housing systems of the mid and late twentieth century; they were beset by all manner of exclusions and inequalities (Florida & Feldman, 1988). They did, however, present an attractive alternative to the chronic insecurity and 'landlord tyranny' that many households had previously endured as private tenants. In particular, what Arundel and Ronald (2021) describe as the 'promise of homeownership' offered a compelling vision of mass property ownership, security and the ability to acquire wealth for a wide swathe of the population. This vision, and indeed ideology (Ronald, 2008), proved immensely compelling across many countries. But the 'promise of homeownership', from today's perspective, seems like a broken one. The ability to buy a house is increasingly limited, as house prices soar beyond the reach of many, and investors outcompete would-be first-time buyers. Low-income and precarious households, especially younger households, migrants, lone parents and other more economically vulnerable cohorts, have found themselves locked out of housing markets. The residualization of social housing, typical of the neoliberal turn in housing policy virtually everywhere, has reduced access to this tenure, leaving many with nowhere to turn except the PRS.

Growing demand for PRS housing has in turn created an investment opportunity, leading to a vicious cycle and a housing market that is increasingly perceived as favouring investors over residents (Rolnik, 2019). Although it is not often stated explicitly, at the heart of this process is a concentration of ownership of residential property, as a growing proportion of the housing stock is held in fewer hands. In other words, the generation rent phenomenon I first encountered while meeting tenants a decade ago is a symptom of a transformation in property relations within the housing system. This takes the form both of households of multi-property ownership and the mass ownership of rental properties by behemoth financial institutions.

Little wonder, then, that the tenant activism that was beginning in Dublin in those years was also emerging in many countries facing similar issues. In Spain, for example, a new generation of tenant unions was established, starting in 2017, and has grown to be a significant political force. The UK saw a similar development, first with the establishment of Living Rent in Scotland, and later with the emergence of the London Renters' Union and other similar organizations across England. Meanwhile, in societies that had long had much bigger PRSs, especially Germany, the plight of renters also came to the fore, culminating in the now famous Berlin campaign for a referendum on the expropriation of PRS housing owned by financial institutions (discussed in more detail in Chapter 7). This re-politicization of the PRS is driven by the poor housing outcomes often associated with the sector, like evictions and rapid rent inflation. But, more than this, it is driven by that sense of frustration I first encountered with the Dublin Tenants' Association: there is something about living in someone else's 'asset' that just feels wrong to many people. As well as undermining the ability of tenants to create a real, long-term and stable home, being a tenant can generate a feeling of disempowerment (Madden & Marcuse, 2016).

A lot has been said about these issues over recent years, within the media, politics and academia. Media framings have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been unhelpful. At least in English-speaking countries, there has been a focus on millennials, especially middle-class couples, who have been unable to access homeownership and get 'on the property ladder'. Indeed, it can sometimes feel as though the media diagnosis of the problem is that middle-income millennials have not been able to perpetuate the same way of relating to housing that has gotten us into this mess in the first place. Meanwhile, to the extent that the politics of so-called 'generation rent' is addressed, it is in the form of a simplistic 'boomers vs millennials' narrative. On the one hand, the self-appointed boomer spokespeople blame younger cohorts for their feckless spending on smashed avocado and flat whites; on the other, the righteous defenders of younger generations argue that 'boomers' had everything, especially housing, handed to them on a plate. Both narratives are as false as they are unhelpful.

Thankfully, there has also been a resurgence of academic research that elucidates the nature, drivers and implications of the resurgence of the PRS. Although it is difficult to draw a hard and fast distinction, we can broadly think of this literature in terms of two fields of research: the political economy of housing and housing studies. Beginning with the latter, a huge amount of research has been published over the last decade or so shedding insights into the contemporary PRS. This research includes work focusing on the factors which have caused the decline of homeownership, and to a lesser extent social housing, and the related growth in the proportion of households living in the PRS (Arundel & Doling, 2017; Arundel & Ronald, 2021; Bone, 2014; Byrne, 2020a; Forrest & Hirayama, 2015; Hochstenbach & Ronald, 2020; Kemp, 2015, 2023; McKee, 2012; Ronald & Kadi, 2017). Another strand of research focuses on the subjective experiences of PRS households (Byrne, 2020b; Byrne & Sassi, 2023; Desmond, 2016; Hoolachan et al., 2017; Hulse et al., 2019; McKee et al., 2019; Soaita, 2021; Soaita & McKee, 2020), the nature of 'home' in the PRS (Bate, 2018, 2021; Easthope, 2014; Soaita & McKee, 2019), the social relationships between landlord and tenant, and the related power relationship between them (Byrne & McArdle, 2022; Chisholm et al., 2020; Desmond, 2016; Lister, 2004, 2005; McArdle & Byrne, 2022; McKee & Harris, 2025). A particular concern within this research has been the issue of housing insecurity and its significance for tenants' experiences within the PRS (Desmond, 2016), as well as its impacts on a host of outcomes from mental health to education (Acharya et al., 2022; Bone, 2014; Morris et al., 2017; Power, 2017; Soederberg, 2018). While housing insecurity and eviction is one set of housing outcomes related to inequality, the housing studies literature has also addressed the much wider set of interrelationships between the resurgence of the PRS and inequality (Arundel, 2017; Christophers, 2017; Forrest & Hirayama, 2015, 2018; Hochstenbach, 2022) and 'precarity' (Arundel & Lennartz, 2020; Bone, 2014; Listerborn, 2023;...