A Jacobin review of Michael Byrne’s Beyond Generation Rent makes the case that the housing crisis is not a generational story — it’s a class story. The real divide is between renters and property owners of all ages, and treating housing as a boomer-vs-millennial fight is a political dead end that blocks class solidarity.
Byrne’s political economy of the private rental sector:
- Landlordism is a social relationship built on a power asymmetry between asset owner and resident — landlords profit from “home rent,” including the value tenants create by making a place feel like home.
- The crisis is between renters and (especially multiple) property owners of all ages, not between generations; the “generation rent” framing is a barrier to solidarity.
- Homeownership stabilizes capitalism two ways: housing concentrates in ever fewer hands, while just enough people keep a material stake to maintain consent — “late homeownership societies.”
- Rent is central to the system: real estate is a core source of stable returns under neoliberalism, and internationalized landlordism means central-bank rate decisions ripple into renters’ lives everywhere.
The hopeful half is tenant organizing. Scotland banned no-fault evictions and introduced rent controls; Berlin’s “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.” referendum proposed what Byrne calls “one of, if not the most, radical forms of housing redistribution ever undertaken in a capitalist society.” Peggs flags the book’s blind spot — social housing, which offers security outside the housing-wealth system — and endorses its program: more nonmarket housing, restrictions on private landlordism, and direct redistribution.
The takeaway is pointed: housing inequality is not a demographic accident but a central plank of how capitalism distributes wealth and consent. That’s why the fix is political, and why tenant power — not housing-policy tinkering — is the lever.