In recent years, renters’ unions have played an increasingly prominent role in a number of countries, with tenants’ groups exerting influence on national discussion and to some extent on the policies of governments and political parties. Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Scotland have all implemented some form of rent control since 2021. Against that backdrop, several writers have sought to combine the questions of political strategy raised by tenant struggles with the political economy of housing.

Michael Byrne’s book, Beyond Generation Rent, is part of this trend, examining inequality, financialization, and evictions. It’s a welcome and worthwhile contribution that brings a social critique of landlordism into contemporary academic economics. It also fleshes out a much-needed theory of how and why the private rental sector is inherently organized around the pursuit of economic rents, profiting from control of a scarce asset, and it brings the economic debate into the same discussion as the work of renters’ unions and their prospects.

Byrne pulls no punches as he discusses the “impunity” of landlords in their relationship with tenants and the chronic insecurity this produces for the latter. He correctly identifies landlordism as a social relationship that depends on a power asymmetry between the asset owner and the resident. This ground has been well covered in recent years, particularly in Nick Bano’s Against Landlords, but by bringing it closer to the political economy debate, Byrne helps us grasp how the private rental sector operates and its role within the wider economic system.