Beyond Affordability: The Housing Crisis as a Problem of Freedom
By Michael Coleman
Even aside from the financial toll of renting, consider the psychological hardship of trying to make a life for yourself and your family in what is ultimately someone else's spare house. Your home — your place in the world, your refuge, the stage for all the private dramas of your intimate life — can be taken away from you at any time, through no fault of your own, for the financial benefit of someone wealthier than you are. This is obviously not the life most of us would choose for ourselves.'
— Sally Rooney, Irish Times (2023)
There is a particular kind of email or text that anyone who has rented in Dublin will have written. The fridge has been broken for a week. You have drafted the message three times. You have removed the word "again". You have added "sorry to bother you" and then removed it and then put it back. You are not asking for a favour. Rather, you are asking for something the law says you are entitled to. And yet you are writing like a supplicant, because some part of you understands that this person can, with a plausible enough reason and the right paperwork, take your home away from you.
This experience, I want to argue, points to a serious political problem; an aspect of the multi-layered housing crisis we currently live under which socialists have thus far lacked the language to describe. Certainly, we already understand the housing crisis as a crisis of affordability and of extraction [1]- a product of economic inequality in which a small fraction of the population own multiple homes where a much larger one own none. We know too that this is not inevitable. In many countries the private rental sector (PRS) declined for much of the twentieth century [2] as governments built social housing and regulated private renting heavily. Those days, however, seem very long ago.
What I want to suggest is that underlying all of this is the fact that life in the private rental sector as it exists now is in fact a crisis of freedom. Not freedom, to be clear, as many liberals would understand it as the absence of direct outside interference. And not the kind of freedom that would appear to be guaranteed by the numerous formal rights tenants possess. The tenant writing the above email may possess the full complement of rights the Irish state currently provides. They may have a Part 4 tenancy, a rent pressure zone cap, a statutory standard of habitability, and a body they can complain to. None of that is what is going on in the drafting and redrafting. Nothing has been taken from them at that moment and no right has been violated; they are simply conducting themselves, in what is supposed to be their home, with the care of someone who knows they can be got rid of.
What socialists can take from republicanism
The tradition which I want to draw from that does possess the language to describe such unfreedom is both socialist and republican [3], and can be traced back to the work of Marx himself. This socialist republican view sees freedom as meaning non-domination. You are unfree when someone else has the capacity to interfere with you arbitrarily, whether or not they ever use it. The paradigm case is the slave with a kind master: they may never suffer any interference, but they are still obviously not free. This is because everything about their life runs on another person's continued goodwill. What makes them unfree is not what happens to them, but what could happen and what they must therefore do to prevent it.
Contemporary republican political thinkers, of which the Irish philosopher Phillip Pettit is the most prominent example, have typically used this viewpoint to think about states and constitutions. However, it should be stressed that there is nothing inherently socialist about it. It’s all well and good to think about relations of domination in the context of the state, but Marxists should be clear that any account that ignores economic relations and broader social structures is totally insufficient. As if to prove this point, Pettit has argued that we can be ‘complacent’ about the dominating potential of markets even where economic inequality is widespread [4].
Readers might wonder why we ought to bother with the republican angle at all. We already have a perfectly good account of the landlord-rent is extraction. The landlord is a rentier and the relation is one of exploitation; what more is a vocabulary of "domination" supposed to add beyond a philosophical gloss on something Marxists have understood since the nineteenth century?
The first thing to say here is that it is clear, as a growing cohort of socialist thinkers and activists have insisted, that domination as a category does apply to the economy [5]. As the American ‘labour republicans’ of the 19th century first pointed out [6], the worker who can be dismissed at will is dependent on their employer's forbearance in the same structural way the slave is dependent on the master's, however decently that employer happens to behave.
Second, this republican conceptual framework is not an import from outside. As Bruno Leipold has recently shown at length [7], Marx's own critique of wage labour is saturated with republican themes and concepts. The wage worker is compared to a slave not for rhetorical effect but because Marx is making a claim about dependence. The political theorist William Clare Roberts [8] reads Capital in much the same spirit, as an argument that market relations subject people to an aggregate and unaccountable will that renders them, in his phrase, irresponsible for their own economic lives. The republican idiom is not a liberal graft onto Marxism; it is something that was always within Marxism.
Finally, and most importantly for our purposes here, the descriptions of exploitation and domination do different, if related, jobs. Exploitation names what is taken. Domination names the relation that makes the taking possible, and that persists after the transaction is complete. Nothing is extracted from our tenant at the moment they delete the word ‘again’ from the email. The rent is paid and will be paid. On the ledger, that month looks like every other. What is happening is that a person is modifying their conduct in their own home in anticipation of another person's power over them. That is a loss of freedom which is not reducible to a transfer of value. What I want to suggest is that if we lack a conception for this, then we will not notice when our own preferred organising tactics and policies fail to address it.
Three moments of domination
To understand why this framework matters for housing, it helps to see how socialist republicans apply it to labour and capital. Bruno Leipold [9] has recently drawn together a number of important threads in his book Citizen Marx, an account of the role of republicanism within Marx’s thought. His analysis of Marx’s account of wage labour identifies three sequential moments through which domination in the labour market operates: structural domination through background conditions, extractive domination at the moment of contract, and personal domination within the workplace itself. As a result of these moments, Marx says in Capital, the worker enters the labour process 'timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but — a hiding' [10]. What I argue is that many tenants in the private rental sector are dominated in precisely this sense. The three-moment framework established above applies directly to housing, not merely by analogy to the workplace, but because housing is itself a site of social domination of the kind this framework is designed to diagnose. Let’s now move through each of them in turn.
The first thing to note is that specific distributions of property and wealth can be dominating in their own right when they place one class of people in a position of systematic dependence on another. In these instances, they are not merely vulnerable to the arbitrary interference of specific individuals, but subject to the will of a class whose structural position gives them power to determine access to the means of survival and reproduction. Most socialists will recognise the argument here; the worker under capitalism has no meaningful choice but to sell their labour to a capitalist master, because the alternative is destitution. Regardless of whether or not workers are technically free to choose a different boss, what matters is not the voluntariness of any particular contract but rather the structural condition that makes having a master unavoidable in the first place.
Similarly, the freedom to leave a particular landlord is not the freedom to leave the rental sector. Shelter is a good which cannot be foregone, and for a growing share of the population home ownership is now a pipedream. The alternative to accepting one landlord's terms is accepting another's. This is what socialist republicans call structural domination- not the power of a particular person over you, but the position you occupy relative to a class of people who collectively control access to something you cannot do without. The tenant's dependence does not come from having a bad landlord, it comes from having to have any landlord in the first place.
That position then makes the second and third moments possible. First, a landlord bargaining with someone who has nowhere else to go can set terms that nobody with alternatives would accept: rent at the ceiling of what the market will bear, tenure that suits the landlord's flexibility rather than the tenant's stability, conditions tolerated because contesting them costs more than enduring them. This is the extractive moment, the point at which structural dependence is converted into a contract.
The third moment is personal domination. Simply put, the landlord who arbitrarily holds the threat of eviction over a tenant's head is exercising unchecked power which amounts to domination. Regulation may mean that landlords are not unchecked tyrants in the manner of Dickensian caricature, but even in regulated markets landlords can impose arbitrary rules about how a tenant may use their space and demand access to the property at inconvenient times. These micro-dominations are insidious because many of the impositions that characterise a tenancy (no pets, no painting, no guests midweek, inspections, the expectation of a prompt and pleasant reply) are individually too small to fight. Each falls below the threshold at which anyone would go to a tribunal, and a tenant who took each one seriously would look unreasonable. The threat of eviction may be more implicit or subtle, but landlords are still exercising a form of arbitrary power over the most intimate space in that person's life. Recent research into the Irish rental sector has described this as a state of ‘textured insecurity’ [11].
These three moments are mutually reinforcing. Because shelter cannot be foregone and because, for a growing proportion of the population, private renting is the only available tenure, tenants have no meaningful exit from a market in which landlords collectively hold structural power over them. This background condition is what transforms what might otherwise seem like a bilateral dispute between a tenant and an individual landlord into a systematic relation of domination. Moreover, this is also a relation which enables exploitation at the moment of contract in the same way that the structural position of capital enables extraction from labour.
Financialisation and Domination
An important thing to note is that there is nothing inevitable about the structures identified by the term ‘structural domination’. Indeed, the dominating nature of these structures has been significantly compounded by the financialisation of housing. Over the past two decades, and accelerating sharply after the 2008 financial crisis, housing in Ireland has undergone increasing integration into global financial markets through vehicles such as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) and other large-scale institutional landlord structures. Because of this, tenants are treated as the mechanism through which financial returns are delivered to shareholders rather than as people whose need for a home is the point of the enterprise.
While more liberal republicans maintain that you cannot be dominated by a system [12], Marxist republicans have retorted that market relations under capitalism subject all participants to the aggregate, arbitrary wills of an unknowable network of buyers, sellers, and investors, rendering people 'systematically irresponsible for their economic life' [13]. This argument maps with particular precision onto the situation of tenants in financialised housing markets. A tenant renting from a REIT is not navigating a bilateral relationship with an individual landlord whose decisions they might at least in principle influence or contest. Instead, they are subject to decisions made by pension funds, asset managers, and shareholders whose primary interest is yield, not shelter. In many cases, tenants may not even know the identity of their actual landlord, paying rent to a property management company which is itself a subsidiary of a larger financial institution.
Crucially, all of this is the product of deliberate decisions by identifiable agents. REITs became a significant element of Irish housing policy after 2013, facilitated by a highly favourable tax regime that minimised tax on profits from Irish property and exempted REITs from corporate tax [14]. Within eight years, the global institutional landlord sector went from owning a negligible number of Irish properties to an estimated 20,000 rental properties, principally in greater Dublin. This growth was directly enabled by state action, including the use of the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) to channel distressed post-crash property assets to international investors at advantageous prices.
The consequences for tenants operate at each of the three moments. At the structural level, institutional landlords' control over large portfolios in concentrated geographic areas means that tenants' exit options are constrained not just by the housing market in general but by the specific market power of a small number of actors with coordinated pricing strategies. At the extractive moment, institutional landlords' rent-setting strategies have played a significant role in shaping rent levels in areas where they are concentrated [15], extracting the maximum the market will bear from tenants whose structural dependence leaves them in no position to resist. At the level of personal domination, institutional ownership does not dissolve the landlord-tenant power relation but instead reconfigures it. Property managers play the same role that an individual landlord does, conducting inspections, enforcing rules, and holding the power to initiate eviction proceedings, while the institutional structure insulates those at the top from accountability and makes it far harder for tenants to identify, let alone contest, the ultimate source of the decisions that govern their homes.
Why rights and regulations are insufficient and what socialists should demand
A key claim I want to make here is that pursuing stronger tenants' rights and regulations does not adequately address the crisis of freedom in the private rental sector. To be clear, this does not mean that these things achieve nothing. What it does mean, however, is that rights that tenants hold but cannot use are not doing the work we credit them with, and the reason they cannot use them is the structural position I have just described.
As an example, take the German Mietpreisbremse, the rent brake, introduced in 2015 and among the more developed rent regulations in Europe. A survey of its operation in Munich found that while as many as 38 per cent of tenants were in a position to invoke it, around 2 per cent had actually secured a reduction [16]. Consider what that gap represents. It is not a legal defect and not an enforcement gap in the ordinary sense. It is thirty-six per cent of tenants deciding, individually and in private, that the thing they are entitled to is not worth what asking for it might cost them.
Irish tenants will recognise the calculation. Eviction here cannot be arbitrary, but the permitted grounds are broad enough that the line between a legitimate and a pretextual reason is very difficult to police- and a landlord's right to sell hangs over every tenancy as a standing possibility that requires no bad faith whatsoever to invoke. A tenant who has become inconvenient does not need to be threatened. Both parties know the shape of the situation.
What ought this mean for socialists’ core demands around housing? The standard demands we make point to necessary actions, but remain insufficient as they are now. Build public housing at scale, cap rents, end no-fault eviction- all of these are important. But notice how we usually justify them. We argue from cost, from scarcity, from the indignity of homelessness. We argue, in other words, about what tenants pay and where tenants sleep. All of these are important, but they also miss the problem of domination.
A purely supply-side victory illustrates this. Suppose enough homes are built that rents fall substantially. That would be a genuine gain which to some degree weakens structural domination- a tenant with somewhere else to go has some leverage. But it leaves the relation itself untouched. The email still gets drafted three times, because the landlord still holds the power to end the tenancy and the tenant still has more to lose than they do. Cheaper domination is better than expensive domination, but it is not freedom, and a movement that measures itself only on affordability will declare victory somewhere short of it. Rent controls, even in an ideal world, suffer from similar shortcomings.
If we highlight freedom as a problem, it shifts our emphasis somewhat. First, the role of tenant unions comes strongly into view. Not just as advice services that help individuals navigate disputes, but as political organisations. Individual tenants may struggle to force confrontation over micro-dominations, but when they act collectively they are no longer alone. Recent work on tenant organising by UCD housing researcher Michael Byrne [17] notes an irony here which is also an opportunity. Institutional landlords, for all their power, organise tenants for us. They operate at scale; they produce large groups of people with identical grievances and a common adversary, and their remoteness makes them far easier to fight in public than the small landlord whose tenants feel a complaint would be a personal betrayal.
A second thing that comes into focus is a potential alternative to tenure itself. Community land trusts and cooperative housing are often understood in terms of affordability, but their real value lies in freedom. Indeed, they potentially address all three moments at once. Removing land from the speculative market weakens structural dependence; cost-covering rents close the extractive moment; and, most importantly, democratic governance means the rules a resident lives under are rules they had a hand in making rather than another person's will [18]. The clear objection to this is one of scalability and practicality. These models, unfortunately, remain marginal nearly everywhere and seem quite fanciful this side of the communist horizon. They can point us toward the kinds of goals that are more achievable, however. Expanded public housing alone does not automatically satisfy the freedom criterion. The state as a landlord can also be arbitrary, also impose rules, also leave residents with little recourse. But these issues can be mitigated. From a socialist perspective, a close-to-textbook example in terms of public housing is Vienna, and its achievement is not simply that the city owns housing but that much of it runs through federally regulated limited-profit associations with secure open-ended tenure [19]. All of this is to say that ownership is not the same as self-government, and freedom requires both.
Conclusion
The socialist and radical republican traditions have always held that freedom requires more than the absence of coercion; it requires the material and social conditions in which a person can stand up straight. The tenant who moves carefully through their own home, who never quite makes it theirs, who signs each renewal knowing the place is ultimately someone else's asset, is not free in any sense that anybody should accept.
Notes
David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (London, 2016); Michael Byrne, 'Generation Rent and the Financialization of Housing: A Comparative Exploration of the Growth of the Private Rental Sector in Ireland, the UK and Spain', Housing Studies, vol. 37, no. 4 (2020), pp. 617–638.
Tony Crook and Peter Kemp (eds.), Private Rental Housing: Comparative Perspectives (Cheltenham, 2014); Peter Kemp, 'Private Renting after the Global Financial Crisis', Housing Studies, vol. 30, no. 4 (2015), pp. 601–620.
Readers should note that I am not here speaking about Irish republicanism, but rather republicanism in the broadest sense of the word as the ideology and movement which promotes self-rule by citizens as a system of government.
Philip Pettit, 'Freedom in the Market', Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, vol. 5, no. 2 (2006), pp. 131–149, at p. 142.
See Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2015); Tom O'Shea, 'Socialist Republicanism', Political Theory, vol. 48, no. 5 (2020), pp. 548–572; Michael Coleman, 'Securing Non-domination in the Social Republic: A Social Republican Theory of Rights', European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 24, no. 2 (2025), pp. 200–221.
Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth.
Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx (Cambridge, 2024)
William Clare Roberts, Marx's Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, 2017).
Ibid.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (London, 1976), p. 280.
Michael Byrne and Rory McArdle, 'Secure Occupancy, Power and the Landlord-Tenant Relation: A Qualitative Exploration of the Irish Private Rental Sector', Housing Studies, vol. 37, no. 1 (2022), pp. 124–142.
Pettit, 'Freedom in the Market', pp. 139–140.
Roberts, Marx's Inferno, p. 101.
Lima, V., Hearne, R. and Murphy, M.P. (2023) ‘Housing financialisation and the creation of homelessness in Ireland’, Housing Studies, 38(9), pp. 1695–1718; Michael Byrne, ''Asset Price Urbanism' and Financialization after the Crisis: Ireland's National Asset Management Agency', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 40, no. 1 (2016), pp. 31–45.
Lima, Hearne and Murphy (2023)
Franziska Sommer et al., 'Survey on the Effectiveness of the Rent Brake in Munich', SocArXiv preprint (2024), available at osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/439yr.
Michael Byrne, 'The Political Economy of the "Residential Rent Relation": Antagonism and Tenant Organising in the Irish Rental Sector', Radical Housing Journal, vol. 1, no. 2 (2019), pp. 9–26, available at radicalhousingjournal.org.
Amanda Huron, Carving Out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C. (Minneapolis, 2018); Tom Joubert and Stuart Hodkinson, 'Beyond the Rent Strike, Towards the Commons: Why the Housing Question Requires Activism that Generates its Own Alternatives', in Neil Gray (ed.), Rent and its Discontents: A Century of Housing Struggle (London, 2018), pp. 185–200.
Justin Kadi, 'Recommodifying Housing in Formerly "Red" Vienna?', Housing, Theory and Society, vol. 32, no. 3 (2015), pp. 247–265.