107 – Tenant Politics and Urban Political Economy

Within the last years four books have been published exploring the political economy of the private rental sector, with a focus on inequality and resistance. This episode would bring together all four authors (see below) to explore the political economy forces driving the growth of the private rental sector and associated forms of housing injustice (e.g. unaffordability, evictions), the analytical approaches that can best draw out what is at stake in all this (especially from a political perspective), and how this all relates to the renaissance of tenant organizing across many countries in the Global North. By bringing together four of the most prominent authors/activists in this area, the episode aims to capture a crucial moment in the articulation of the emerging politics of the private rental sector.
The four books all share a critical urban political economy orientation, drawing on concepts such as financialization and rent. They are all also all interested in ‘residents as agents’, and the practices and organizational forms through which movements seek to create ‘tenants as subject’. The episode would not focus on any of the four books as such, but rather discuss the cross-cutting themes. As the books reflect a variety of different cities/countries, this discussion has the potential to gain a wide listenership and to inform tenant organizing and scholar activism.

More on the discussed books:

• Michael Byrne. 2026. Beyond Generation Rent: Political economy, inequality and the private rental sector. Polity Press. This book establishes a critical political economy framework to analyze the contemporary private rental sector. It synthesizes much of the literature, draws on examples from a host of countries (including UK, Ireland, the US, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Spain), and develops novel concepts such as ‘home rent’. The last chapter summarizes the historical and contemporary literature on tenant unions, and discusses two case studies: the Deutsche Wohnen und Co. Entiegen campaign in Berling, and the Madrid and Barcelona tenant unions.
• Tracy Rosenthal & Leonardo Vilchis. 2024. Abolish rent: How tenants can end the housing crisis. Haymarket Books This book develops a critique of the private rental sector from a tenant perspective, based on the authors’ participation in the Los Angeles Tenant Union and the wider US housing justice movement. It is primarily an activist book but the arguments are situated very clearly in a political economy analysis focusing on the tension between asset and home, the implications of for tenants experience of housing, and the forms of resistance and organizing that have emerged in response.
• Jaime Palomera. 2025. El Secuestro de la Vivienda. Peninsula This book (not available in English) is focused on the Spanish context. It also presents a political economy of private rental housing, drawing on work in the housing financialisation literature (e.g. Manuel Aalbers, Brett Christophers) to understand the specificity of housing markets, the futility of the ‘supply, supply, supply’ approach, as well as the fundamentally unjust or ‘rigged’ nature of housing markets. It examines the emergence of a ‘tenant subject’ composed of diverse cohorts (migrants, low-income workers) and the political potential of this subject to radically transform housing systems.
• Jacob Stringer. 2025. Renters Unite: How tenant unions are fighting the housing crisis. Pluto Press This book examines tenant organising across numerous countries. It is discusses detailed examples of different forms of tenant organising, where strategies are shared or distinct across different contexts, the politics of different organisational approaches, the role of education etc. It is very much situated ‘at the front line’ of tenants movements, and captures better than any other book this phenomenon in an international context.

Host & Guest:

Guests:

Note: Episode edit and publication by Anne Goßler