Rundale

A review of Michael Byrne’s Beyond Generation Rent: Political Economy, Inequality and the Private Rental Sector

 Photo by Salim Virji, CC BY-SA 2.0, dithered to reduce file size.

Luke Hussey

Michael Byrne is a sociologist at University College Dublin, the editor of the blog The Week in Housing and is among the most closely read commentators on the Irish rental market. His new book, Beyond Generation Rent, comes out at a significant moment in Irish housing politics. The Residential Tenancies (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2026 contains the most substantial reforms of the private rental sector (PRS) since the COVID-19 pandemic. In the months preceding its passing, elevated eviction notices citing intent to sell generated widespread public concern over a mass exodus of small landlords from the market. Placed in the context of the preceding years, however, the figures are broadly consistent with longer trends; aggregate RTB data points to a gradual recomposition of the market, with institutional actors accounting for a growing share of registered tenancies, especially new build to rent (BtR) apartments in Dublin. Considering the higher likelihood of institutional landlords hiking rents and evicting tenants, who owns the homes we rent, and on what terms, is a question Byrne’s book is well placed to address.

Accounting for roughly 18 per cent of Irish housing, private renting is being pulled in two directions by the recent reforms. On security of tenure, it strengthens tenant protections with new tenancies now set to a minimum of 6 years; no-fault evictions are removed for landlords with four or more properties; and for ongoing tenancies the rent is capped nationally at the lower end of the consumer price index (CPI) – or at 2 per cent. On rent setting, it deregulates, as landlords may now reset rents to market levels following tenancy turnover, or at the end of each six-year cycle; while new-build apartments (the majority of which are corporate BtR) commenced after June 2025 are exempt from the two per cent cap entirely and tracked only against CPI.

The deregulatory provisions which permit landlords to reset rents to market levels for incoming tenants have been justified by the government on supply grounds, the argument being that the prospect of market returns will attract further construction and exert downward pressure on rents over time. As Byrne has noted in his blog, this argument only holds if affordability is measured against a counterfactual future without equivalent supply growth, rather than against people’s actual incomes. For renters whose housing costs are already too high, this does nothing to address their needs. Indeed, the market reset on turnover arguably incentivises landlords to encourage shorter tenancies through evictions using creative means.

It is this subordination of tenant need to the logic of the market which necessitates careful examination. While Beyond Generation Rent does not discuss this particular policy debate, (its scope being larger than Ireland), it details the social relations that organise the political economy of the private rental sector (PRS) more broadly, something dominant narratives on supply have largely ignored. It is therefore a timely contribution.

The book’s central theoretical contribution is the concept of home rent, which describes the inherently extractive relationship between landlord and tenant, one that is determined by broader property relations. Byrne centres the productive role of tenants in homemaking, the work of creating the home’s innate value. Similarly central is the denaturalisation of these property relations. He notes that both dominant policy and economistic framings of the PRS mystify the power asymmetry between landlord and tenant. The PRS exists because of an unequal distribution of property, and so the relation between parties is coercive – one side has the capacity to evict and the other does not.

Why has this asymmetry become so consequential today? Byrne’s historical account details how mass homeownership was produced and then unwound. The post-war settlement that institutionalised homeownership across western capitalist economies was partially a response to Soviet communism, drawing working class households into the property-owning order. In Ireland, direct public construction, grants, and mortgage provision by building associations all contributed to homeownership rates of around 80 per cent by 1991 (p. 43). The subsequent removal of these supports and right-to-buy provisions that drew down the social housing stock set the preconditions for nominal house prices to rise by approximately 300 per cent between 1996 and 2006 (p. 45). With the global financial crisis there came restricted credit access, declining income and job security, and the proliferation of buy-to-let mortgage products which accelerated the expansion of the PRS. Meanwhile, non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) sought to acquire distressed assets at considerable discount through the purchase of nonperforming loans and repossession of properties held in negative equity. Real estate investment trusts (REITs) were established in Ireland – and in other countries, such as Spain – to financialise the rental sector, overcoming the spatial fixity of real estate through globally tradeable shares. The return of the PRS as a prominent feature of housing provision is thus a structural consequence of financialisation and the unwinding of the post-war settlement.

Byrne presents stark figures, such as: “97 per cent of Ireland’s wealth is held by homeowners” and 3 per cent by renters, despite renters comprising 30 per cent of households; that the average net wealth of Irish homeowners in 2020 was €303,900 against €5,300 for renters (p. 97); and that institutional landlords are 68 per cent more likely to issue eviction notices than other landlord types (p. 74). It follows that the new Residential Tenancies Act extends the structural advantages of a class that already monopolises housing and wealth. Given that these reforms incentivise the construction of BtR apartments, while corporate landlords are increasing as a share of the PRS, the policy is predicated on the assumption that supply will reduce rent inflation over time. This seems a foolish gambit. Even if luxury new builds can achieve this, the question remains: is this the only housing system possible in Ireland today?

Byrne’s book elegantly illustrates the relational dynamic between parties operating in PRS – landlords and tenants – as mutually constitutive social forms, produced and reproduced by broader political economic realities, informing the distribution of property and vice versa. There is nothing natural about either; Byrne’s concept of home rent advances this by foregrounding the productive role of tenants in generating the value upon which rental relations depend. While place-based value is often created by tenants and homeowners through property investment, community associations and neighbourhood improvement, which is then captured by capitalists, speculators, and landlords through rising rents and house prices (as David Harvey’s work on class-monopoly rent shows), home value – derived from homemaking – does not circulate. As Byrne states, once eviction occurs the value of home for the resident is ‘effectively destroyed’ (p. 31). The classical preoccupation with land rent and the unequal distribution of property, which Byrne traces to Henry George (p. 21), here gives way to a question about value itself: not only who captures the value attached to place, but whether the value tenants produce in homemaking is strictly value at all.

Home rent sits somewhat in tension within the broader tradition of value theory. As per Marx, a commodity is the unity of use value (the potential a commodity holds by virtue of what it can be used for) and exchange value (the form its value takes at market, the money expression of which is price). Here use and exchange value are bound together in the commodity form and cannot be separated, and the social relations which produce it are mystified through exchange; the commodity is fetishised. This mystification is exactly what home rent gestures toward. Byrne’s argument is that this potential value is what the commodity is traded on, an essential need bundled into the commodity form of PRS housing. To quote Byrne: “The tenant must pay rent each month for continued access to the home they themselves have created” (p. 32). The tenant-as-producer of value resembles a labour theory of value claim, which a Marxian framing captures more cleanly than a Georgist one. Yet what the landlord trades on is not the home the tenant has made, but the potential for a home to be made, the same potential that existed before the tenant arrived and will exist after they leave. The value of homemaking leaves no trace in the circuit of exchange, which suggests it never entered that circuit to begin with. Charging for monopolised access to a scarce resource whose value the owner does not produce is indeed rent à la Ricardo and George, not surplus extraction in the Marxian sense. Home rent appraises what tenants produce and stand to lose within the property relation of PRS, but as a theorisation of value in a strict political economic sense, it seemingly invokes two traditions that pull against each other and perhaps requires future work to interrogate the gap it reveals.

As per the book’s title, Byrne is cautious about reducing the housing question to a generational one, and insists the generational fault line is inflected through class by many factors. An obvious example of this is the intergenerational transfer of property within the homeowning cohort. The tension the book acknowledges is that the overall pressures of the cost-of-living crisis and the ongoing concentration of wealth suggest in the main a downward trajectory for younger people’s housing outcomes, which class informs and compounds. As Byrne argues, the temporal dimension of housing regimes determines the generational character in the imbalance of ownership between older and younger cohorts. Given that the title gestures toward a corrective of simplified narratives of boomers against struggling millennials and Gen Z, additional empirical work on how inter and intra-generational inequalities do in fact play out over time and across class might have strengthened the analysis. Admittedly, this would be a substantial undertaking, so we might consider this an invitation for future enquiry in this mode.

If the PRS is structured around a coercive property relation in which one party can evict and the other cannot, the collective organisation of the disadvantaged side is the natural political response to that asymmetry – just as organised labour is the natural response to the asymmetry between worker and employer. The analogy is limited, insofar as workers are concentrated at the point of production, while tenants are dispersed across the city and grievances are experienced mostly privately. This is why durable tenant organisations are so difficult to build. Byrne’s discussion hones in on the Madrid and Barcelona Tenants’ Unions (Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos de Madrid and Sindicat de Llogateres de Catalunya) and the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen (DWE) campaign in Berlin. Notably, the Madrid union has tripled in size in recent years and has won a substantial victory against Blackstone. Though not yet implemented, the DWE referendum of September 2021 passed with 59.1 per cent of the vote in favour of socialising the stock of Berlin’s largest corporate landlords. The asymmetry of the rental relation, in each case, has been challenged by the collective organisation of those on the disadvantaged side.

The practical advantage of being able to mobilise against a large and visible landlord is the (counter-intuitive) benefit to a highly financialised PRS. Ireland’s institutional PRS sits at roughly 15 per cent of the rental stock and the terrain on which the Irish tenants’ movement will operate is dominated, for now, by smaller landlords. However, Dublin’s number is now greater than Madrid’s at well over a quarter. Indeed, our own Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) has close to the same membership as the Madrid Tenants’ Union, though it receives less public attention. Whether it can scale into something large enough to effectively transform the conditions of renting is an open question. CATU is, however, the most serious attempt on the island of Ireland to build this organisational form. Perhaps a future inflection point in Irish politics will see it assume a larger and more visible role in both public debate and successful popular actions.

The supply debate dominates much discussion on housing in Ireland and it’s the terrain that government and economistic analysts prefer. By contrast, the decommodification of housing, at a scale and speed sufficient to meet people’s need, is a harder but more worthy horizon to look to. The demand of a new housing regime ought to be a serious one, even where its present feasibility remains uncertain. Beyond Generation Rent does not set out to be a manual for change; its aim is to reveal the micro-political economic dynamics animating the PRS in developed economies. In this it succeeds. Byrne’s research and analysis offer an invaluable illustration of who has power in the rental relation and provide rich examples of what it takes to shift it.