A Republic of Housing? Arbitrary Authority in the Private Rental Sector

This paper offers a normative diagnosis of contemporary renting by drawing on republican political theory. I argue that private renters are subject to a distinctive form of arbitrary authority that is best understood through the lens of socialist-republicanism. Across much of Western Europe, the private rental sector (PRS) declined throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Governments promoted alternatives such as social housing, while remaining private rental markets were often tightly regulated. From the 1980s onwards, many states further entrenched this settlement by promoting home ownership as the normative ideal. In recent decades, however, this trajectory has reversed. Private renting is ascendant, particularly in large urban centres. This shift has been most pronounced in Anglophone contexts such as Ireland and the United Kingdom, but is increasingly evident even in countries with historically distinct housing regimes, including the Netherlands and Germany. This resurgence has produced a growing class of long-term renters who are persistently priced out of home ownership. Members of this “generation rent” are exposed to prolonged housing insecurity, dependence on volatile markets, and limited prospects for establishing a stable sense of home. While these developments have attracted considerable empirical attention, their implications for authority and power in everyday social relations remain under-theorised. What forms of authority structure the landlord–tenant relationship, and when do these relations amount to authoritarian forms of control? Socialists have long argued that class relations in capitalist societies are structured by asymmetries of ownership that generate relations of domination: those who lack access to essential resources are rendered dependent on the discretionary power of those who control them. The employment relation exemplifies this dynamic, insofar as workers’ dependence on wages exposes them to arbitrary employer authority under the constant threat of dismissal. Although regulation may constrain the most egregious abuses, the underlying structure of dependence sustains domination. I argue that the landlord–tenant relationship exhibits a parallel structure and should be analysed as a site of quasi-authoritarian authority within liberal democracies. The paper develops this claim in two steps. First, it identifies three moments at which landlord authority becomes dominating in the republican sense: (1) structural domination arising from tenants’ market dependence and limited exit options; (2) contractual domination at the point of lease formation, where asymmetries of power and information shape consent; and (3) personal domination exercised through discretionary control over repairs, renewal, surveillance, and eviction. These moments illuminate how authority in the private rental sector is frequently arbitrary, opaque, and weakly contestable- hallmarks of authoritarian social power even in formally democratic societies. Second, the paper considers the implications of this analysis for housing policy and political theory. From a republican perspective, the central normative problem of private renting is not merely insecurity or distributive injustice, but the persistence of authoritarian relations of authority embedded in everyday institutions. Addressing these harms therefore requires more than mitigating abuses; it demands policies that restructure the tenant–landlord relationship itself by limiting discretionary power, strengthening contestability, and reducing the forms of dependence that enable arbitrary rule.