Beyond Generation Rent
Political Economy, Inequality, and the Private Rental Sector

Michael Byrne (Author)

9781509563425, Polity Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 January 2026

208 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.318 kg

"'There's no place like home.'" Beyond Generation Rent is a studied and decisive intervention that uses — and improves — the tools of political economy to rethink rent, home and the housing question. It offers new analytics to take on and take seriously the fundamental injustice of property relations, which forces tenants to make their lives in someone else's spare house."
Tracy Rosenthal, author of Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis

"Michael Byrne has produced a compelling synthesis of contemporary literature on private renting, tenant experiences, financialization and the political economy of housing, which sets out the many challenges facing tenants across the countries studied and discussed in this book. For readers wanting to understand the challenges facing the sector, and to debate ways forward, this should be required reading."
Ken Gibb, University of Glasgow

As societies struggle to respond to the revival of private renting, this book offers the first comprehensive and critical account of the inequality at the heart of contemporary housing systems. Bringing together cutting-edge research and case studies from a host of countries — from the USA to Australia, from Spain to Germany — Michael Byrne examines inequality, financialization, the rise of 'generation landlord' and evictions. He analyses the everyday power dynamics between landlords and tenants and the social and economic structures that mean the ownership of residential property is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Moving beyond the kind of thinking that treats landlordism as natural and inevitable, Byrne's political economy framework demonstrates how declining homeownership and its consequences for inequality and housing justice are major political challenges for contemporary societies. At the same time, a new generation of tenant activism can point the way to fairer housing systems.

A groundbreaking study, Beyond Generation Rent is crucial reading for housing researchers, policy-makers, activists and anyone who cares about decent housing for all.

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: The Political Economy of the Private Rental Sector
2. Conceptualizing Home Rent: The Micro-Political Economy of the Private Rental Sector
3. The Revival of the Private Rental Sector: Neoliberalism, Financialization 1.0 and the Concentration of Property Ownership
4. The Financialization of the Private Rental Sector: The Rise of Institutional Landlords
5. Beyond Generation Rent? Housing Inequality and the Private Rental Sector
6. Making a Home in Someone Else’s Asset: Insecurity and Power in Lightly Regulated Rental Markets
7. The Politics of the Private Rental Sector: Tenants as Agents
Conclusion: Transforming the Social Relations of Home

Bibliography
Index

Subject Areas: Economics [KC]