Global corporate landlordism and a new cycle of tenant contention

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue offers a preliminary comparative reading of the struggles between global corporate landlords (GCLs) and tenants in contemporary urban landscapes. It traces the rise of GCLs in the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the 2008 global financial crisis and suggests that their aggressive property management practices have catalysed a new cycle of tenant contention. Drawing on recent scholarship and the contributions to the special issue, it outlines the main characteristics and operational logics of GCLs, the repertoires of contention developed during this cycle and the key tenant demands and policy proposals that have emerged. The growing concentration of property and power in the hands of GCLs has also brought tenants together in common struggle across multiple sites and scales. While the outcomes of these struggles remain uncertain, they have given rise to radical tenant practices and demands that are beginning to challenge the decades-long trajectory of housing commodification and financialisation underpinning today’s global housing crisis.

Introduction

Rental housing has historically been a site of recurring urban conflict and contestation. Since the turn of the millennium, it has also increasingly become a global asset class (Christophers, 2021a; Fields, 2018; Fields and Uffer, 2014; Gabor and Kohl, 2022; Wijburg et al., 2018). This development has had implications for how rental housing is run and for how tenants dispute their living conditions. The following special issue centres on tenant struggles amid a housing crisis embodied by the figure of the ‘global corporate landlord’ (GCL; Beswick et al., 2016). The aggressive property management practices deployed by GCLs have spurred a new cycle of tenant contention, one that demands both theoretical engagement and empirical investigation. The aim of this collection is to shed light on the conflicts emerging at one of the newest urban frontiers of finance and to analyse the claims, tactics and strategies deployed by tenants and their organisations. Each research article provides insights from urban scholars that have been politically engaged with their subject matter, whether through direct involvement in housing and tenant movements or through public writing and media projects. As such, the special issue presents academic work politically committed to the people and places it investigates.

Although tenant movements are embedded within variegated urban political economies, the experiences of confronting a similar type of landlord – and at times, the very same landlord – provides a shared material basis for translocal and transnational connections and solidarities. A focus on GCLs also offers a distinct entry point for comparative urbanism, as tenant responses are shaped by local conditions while also adapting to the characteristics of this particular type of landlord. While GCLs are not truly global in scope, they do source and deploy capital across multiple countries and are poised to expand their reach when opportunities arise. Their capital is primarily sourced from institutional investors – pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, private endowments and private equity firms – and is deployed in places where rental housing has effectively become a global asset class and offers an attractive risk-return perspective. The resulting geography is largely, though not exclusively, centred in the so-called ‘Global North’ (Aalbers et al., 2023; Andonov et al., 2015; Aveline-Dubach, 2022; Gabor and Kohl, 2022).

The articles of the special issue examine cases in which relations between tenants and GCLs have evolved into open, collective conflict. A range of conditions underpin tenant–landlord relations acquiring a collective dimension, including the scale of GCL operations, the local property and tenure regimes and the social and political composition of tenant populations. Outside a few ‘Global North’ countries, the presence of GCLs is incipient and is not a central focus of current tenant struggles (see Socoloff in this special issue for a commentary on the Latin American context). In many ‘Global South’ contexts, GCLs primarily serve niche markets of middle-class renters and transnationally mobile students and professionals (Migozzi, 2019; Socoloff, 2025). In such contexts, moreover, financialised landlords, such as real estate investment trusts, are often predominantly owned by domestic investors (e.g. Harrison and Butcher, 2025). The handful of countries covered in this special issue – Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States – have become some of the main operational sites of GCLs and tenant conflicts and contestations have become particularly visible. As such, these cases offer insights into the nature of tenant mobilisation in response to the growing presence of GCLs.

While an expanding literature has addressed the emergence of GCLs in the run up to and fall-out from the 2008 global financial crisis and their aggressive property management practices (e.g. Bernt et al., 2017; Beswick et al., 2016; Christophers, 2021b; Gil García and Martínez López, 2023; Lima, 2020; Rolnik, 2019; Vives Miro, 2018), comparatively less scholarly attention has been paid to the resistances and responses these practices have provoked. An exciting new literature is emerging from this angle, although it remains fragmented across dispersed case studies (e.g. Card, 2024; Martínez and Gil, 2024; Richter and Humphry, 2021; Risager, 2021; Shilton, 2021; Wilde, 2019). By bringing together key cases, this special issue provides an opportunity to explore similarities and differences across contexts and to begin outlining an emergent urban agenda grounded in the perspectives, practices and proposals of tenants.

This introductory essay offers a preliminary comparative reading of the struggles between GCLs and tenants. It begins by tracing the rise of GCLs and suggests that their aggressive property management practices have catalysed a new cycle of tenant contention. It then outlines the main repertoires of contention developed during this cycle, followed by a discussion of the key tenant demands and policy proposals that have emerged. Drawing on the contributions to this issue, we argue that despite the growing capital and power commanded by GCLs, the concentration of property in their hands and its integration into financial circuits also opens up new opportunities for tenant organisation and claim-making. The scale of GCLs’ portfolios, coupled with their management according to short-term, profit-maximising imperatives, is drawing increasing numbers of tenants into shared experiences and common property structures. These dynamics are helping to lay the groundwork for multi-building tenant organising and power-building at supra-local scales. At the same time, they have positioned GCLs as targets of new tenant demands which are gaining traction – from the (re)introduction of rent controls to the expropriation and socialisation of their properties. The final section of this introduction outlines the structure of the special issue and the main themes explored in each contribution.

The rise of global corporate landlords

The emergence of GCLs is deeply rooted in transformations within the global capitalist economy, which since the 1970s has been marked by secular stagnation and recurrent crises of overaccumulation (Brenner, 2006; Harvey, 2018). These crises are temporarily displaced through spatial fixes that redirect surplus capital into the built environment thereby generating waves of speculative urban and infrastructural investment aimed at absorbing excess capital and deferring systemic contradictions (Aalbers, 2008; Harvey, 2001). Central to contemporary accumulation strategies has been the financialisation of real estate markets and the transformation of housing into a financial asset (Aalbers, 2016; Adkins et al., 2020). As a result, housing has come to occupy a pivotal role in both accumulation dynamics and crisis management, often undermining its fundamental social function as a place of residence (Madden and Marcuse, 2016).

During the housing boom that preceded the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, this process was driven primarily by the expansion of homeownership, the liberalisation of mortgage credit and the widespread use of securitisation techniques that converted mortgage debt into tradable financial instruments (Aalbers, 2016). Yet, even in this phase, alternative asset managers began to invest in rental housing markets, particularly in urban contexts marked by rental market deregulation and the privatisation of public housing. In Germany, for example, this trend was especially pronounced in cities like Berlin, where the large stock of municipal housing provided fertile ground for mass sell-offs (Bernt et al., 2017; Fields and Uffer, 2014; Wijburg et al., 2018). Municipal housing companies sold off thousands of units, and in some cases were fully privatised. In 2004, the US-based private equity firm Cerberus acquired the municipal housing company GSW, becoming Berlin’s largest landlord overnight (Wijburg et al., 2018). In New York City, private equity firms targeted the rent-stabilised housing sector, which had been progressively deregulated since the 1990s. Between 2005 and 2009, advocates estimated that private equity firms acquired around 100,000 units, or roughly 10% of the city’s rent-regulated stock (Fields, 2017; Fields and Uffer, 2014).

It was the political and economic responses to the 2008 crisis, however, that ushered in a new phase of capital switching, opening novel pathways for housing financialisation in which GCLs assumed a central role. In the wake of the mortgage market collapse, three interrelated dynamics converged to reshape housing landscapes. First, central banks implemented extraordinary monetary interventions, including quantitative easing (QE) programmes that injected vast amounts of liquidity into capital markets. Interest rates fell to historic lows, diminishing the yields on traditional investment instruments such as government bonds. As a result, institutional investors, including pension funds and insurance companies, sought alternative asset classes capable of delivering higher returns. At the same time, the Basel III Accord tightened credit conditions for households and businesses, dampening both consumption and productive investment. This paradoxical context – an unprecedented abundance of circulating capital paired with a lack of profitable outlets – exacerbated the problem of overaccumulation. Real estate, and particularly rental housing, re-emerged as a privileged site for capital absorption and asset appreciation.

Second, the housing crash itself created new opportunities for capital investment. The devaluation of real estate assets in heavily affected countries, including the United States, Spain and Ireland, resulted in a widespread destruction of value that rendered many properties affordable for institutional buyers (Christophers, 2022; Fields, 2018; Guzmán, 2023; Yrigoy, 2021). The collapse of housing prices under the weight of mass mortgage defaults led to a crisis of social reproduction for millions of people but simultaneously opened a speculative frontier for investors. The disjuncture between current and potential asset values enabled global capital to re-enter these markets with the expectation of capturing future price gains. The territories most devastated by the crisis became strategic zones for initiating a new round of accumulation.

Third, this reconfigured post-crisis accumulation regime witnessed a shift in the composition of financial actors. Traditional banks, still reeling from the crisis and constrained by regulatory reforms, ceded ground to alternative asset managers, who capitalised on the post-crisis landscape to acquire extensive housing portfolios and consolidate their presence in global property markets. The pioneering work of Beswick et al. (2016) illustrates how asset managers strategically leveraged the post-2008 crisis environment to consolidate their position as GCLs. Wijburg et al. (2018) distinguish between two modalities in the financialisation of rental housing deployed in this process. The first modality, or Financialisation 1.0, entailed opportunistic buying and selling operations, whereas the second modality, Financialisation 2.0, which gained protagonism in the aftermath of the crisis, is characterised by the involvement of GCLs in longer-term ownership and management of rental housing. As a result, GCLs assume a central role not only in acquiring large-scale portfolios but also in reshaping urban housing systems to prioritise rent extraction and capital appreciation.

Crucially, GCLs are not merely responding to existing market conditions; they are actively co-producing them by shaping policy frameworks, influencing regulation, and directing urban development agendas towards financial imperatives, often at the expense of affordability and housing security. Gabor and Kohl (2022) argue that institutional investors and asset managers have played a central role in constructing housing as a standardised, investable asset class. They have not merely adapted to existing markets but have actively shaped the conditions under which housing can be abstracted, securitised, and traded as a financial commodity. Christophers (2023) offers a comprehensive account of the operational logics of asset managers, elucidating the financial strategies, institutional infrastructures and policy frameworks that have facilitated the emergence of GCLs. At the core of this model is the aggregation of capital from institutional investors which is then leveraged through debt financing. This enables asset managers to mobilise substantial funds, expand their real estate portfolios and amplify expected returns. These dyna-mics have endowed asset managers with unprecedented economic and political power, enabling them to shape housing markets, regulatory agendas and urban development trajectories to align with financial imperatives.

In this special issue, Santamarina and Karaliotas (2025) extend the analysis of GCLs into new domains. They introduce the concept of Asylum Corporate Landlords (ACLs) to describe corporate actors that manage housing for asylum seekers within broader processes of migration governance and welfare outsourcing in Scotland. These actors do not operate within conventional rental markets but instead derive profits from state-guaranteed payments. Their accumulation strategies often rely on minimising maintenance costs, overcrowding units and enforcing compliance through the threat of eviction.

As noted in the introduction, despite the growing footprint of GCLs, their presence is geographically uneven. In the context of limited scholarly attention to this topic outside of the ‘Global North’, Socoloff (2025) in this special issue offers a valuable commentary on the contradictory trajectories of corporate landlordism in Latin America. The presence of GCLs in the region remains constrained by enduring macroeconomic and structural barriers, including financial instability, pronounced income inequality, informal labour markets and underdeveloped welfare systems. In response, GCLs in the region pursue highly selective, opportunistic strategies, focusing on luxury rental segments and multifamily developments in affluent urban areas such as São Paulo, Santiago, and Mexico City. This illustrates that while GCLs are expanding globally, their strategies are contingent on local political economies and institutional configurations.

The ascendancy of GCLs must also be understood within a broader transformation in global wealth accumulation strategies that have fundamentally reshaped patterns of property ownership. As Hochstenbach and Aalbers (2024) argue, contemporary housing markets are increasingly structured around wealth-driven dynamics, in which housing demand is motivated less by the need for shelter than by expectations for rent extraction and future asset appreciation. While GCLs are central to these developments, they are not the only actors involved. Empirical studies in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain show that high-income households are also acquiring residential properties as rental investments (Gil et al., 2025; Hochstenbach, 2022; Ronald and Kadi, 2018). This convergence between institutional and household investors has contributed to an increasing concentration of ownership.

As a result, a growing segment of the population is effectively excluded from homeownership, signalling the decline of the so-called ‘homeowner society’ and the rise of a ‘generation rent’ compelled to inhabit homes acquired by others as financial vehicles (Byrne, 2019). ‘Generation rent’ in the private rental sector is a diverse cohort spanning populations who in previous contexts were either housed in public and limited-profit rental housing or accessed homeownership through the mortgage market. Amongst these, middle-income young adults emerged as the fastest-growing demographic in private rental housing across various contexts, including Australia, the Netherlands, and Ireland (Howard et al., 2024; Waldron, 2023). These profiles joined existing private rental tenants which, with the exception of countries with large tenant populations such as Germany and Switzerland, consisted mostly of lower-middle to low-income residents.

Far from unfolding harmoniously, this structural shift has intensified socio-economic tensions. A tenant population with a broader and more transversal social composition is increasingly required to transfer substantial portions of its income to landlords, rendering rent a central mechanism of wealth extraction and social inequality. This asymmetrical relationship has become a growing source of conflict, giving rise to a new cycle of tenant mobilisation and contestation.

A new cycle of tenant contention

The financialised temporalities and resource capacities of GCLs have underpinned particularly aggressive property management practices. Whether through opportunistic ‘buy cheap and sell dear’ property transactions executed directly by asset managers or longer-term income-producing investments via real estate investment trusts and listed property companies, these strategies are ultimately shaped by short-term imperatives. As Wijburg et al. (2018) observe, even the latter longer-term modalities are conditioned by share price performance and share trading. Short-termism is further embedded in the architecture of the closed-end housing funds established by asset managers, which require that all assets be liquidated and capital, along with returns, be returned to investors within a fixed timeframe, typically 7–12 years (Christophers, 2023). Altogether, the need to revalorise assets between acquisition and sale (whether the assets are properties or shares) drives rent increases, selective renovations, and tenure conversions. These practices frequently result in the displacement of existing residents (August and Walks, 2018; Damiano and Goetz, 2024; Fuller, 2021; Gomory, 2022; Wijburg et al., 2024).

GCLs’ significant financial clout enables them to more actively and effectively pursue these strategies at closing ‘rent gaps’ (Christophers, 2021b). As analysed by Vollmer (2025) with reference to the case of Berlin, this also involves exploiting all possible loopholes, ambivalences and opportunities in legislation to capture related ‘commodification gaps’ (Bernt, 2022). In many instances this can include unlawful actions such as fraud and illegal renovations, as has been recorded in Sweden (Kadıoğlu and Kellecioğlu, 2024; Polanska and Richard, 2021). Short-term gains have also been pursued by reducing fixed costs and maintenance expenses (especially in rent-regulated stock in countries like Germany), leading to deteriorating living quality (Bernt et al., 2017; Wijburg et al., 2024).

Despite the formidable structural power of GCLs, their aggressive property management practices have catalysed a new cycle of tenant contention across multiple geographies. While tenant organisations and unions have long countered landlord interests (Bradley, 2014; Gray, 2018; Madden and Marcuse, 2016), the scale, tactics and complexity of corporate ownership have necessitated an adaptation of the forms of organising and contestation. A new generation of housing organisations and tenant unions has emerged (see Ill-Raga, 2025 in this special issue) and deployed a repertoire of contention reactualising tactics and strategies of the tenant movement. Practices such as anti-eviction resistance, rent strikes and multi-building organising have become prominent tools in confronting GCLs. The expansive reach of GCLs has furthermore enabled tenants to scale up their struggles from individual buildings to citywide and even national campaigns, and created opportunities for alliances between tenant unions and other movements and organisations.

Tenant organising has increasingly coalesced around opposition to forced displacements provoked by GCLs. As Ancelovici and Emperador Badimon (2024) observe with respect to Montreal, New York City and Barcelona, eviction resistance has adapted to the institutional context, power configurations and inherited forms of collective action of each location. The anti-eviction blockade, a tactic of physically obstructing evictions when bailiffs and police attempt to execute them, stands out as a central tactic of the repertoire of contention deployed in this cycle. It not only aims to delay displacement but also serves as leverage for negotiations with landlords. In cities such as Barcelona, a persistent state of mobilisation has been sustained for years around weekly anti-eviction blockades (see Vidal, 2025 in this special issue). This mobilisation is supported by a city-wide campaign to ‘stay put’ and resist displacement pressures (Bonshoms-Guzmán, 2025b). The experiences of displacement produced by GCLs in different housing segments also create opportunities for solidarity across differences, as has been the case of the No Evictions Network in Glasgow, where the city’s tenant union and migrant-led ‘no borders’ groups converged (Santamarina and Karaliotas, 2025).

Another tactic re-emerging in this cycle is the rent strike, which has remained largely dormant in past decades, especially when compared to its prominence in the early 20th century (Gray, 2018; Rolf, 2021). Whereas workers’ strikes have been increasingly regulated and thus channelled into less conflictive, but also less criminalised expressions of industrial conflict, rent strikes have often been part of high-stakes contentious episodes, entering the field of so-called ‘wild’ strikes with high risks for engaged tenants and activists alike. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, for example, became a propitious momentum for such rent strikes in countries like Spain (Rossini et al., 2023) and the UK (Wenham and Young, 2024), although very short-lived (Vilenica et al., 2020). In this special issue, Gustavussen (2025) explores the rent strikes carried out by the Veritas Tenants Association in San Francisco, which were initially sparked by the context of the pandemic. This tactic eventually forced concessions from their landlord and leads Gustavussen to highlight two opportunities for tenant power created by GCLs. On the one hand, the corporate property structure enables multibuilding organising against a shared landlord, which can strengthen tenant leverage. On the other, corporate landlords’ reliance on debt financing increases their vulnerability to the halting of rental streams. Recent rent strikes against GCLs have also been recorded in cities in Canada (Risager, 2021) and Spain (Gil and Palomera, 2024).

The rent strikes in Parkdale, Toronto, in 2017 and 2018, further illustrate the strategic openings provided by the new relational networks tied to GCLs (Shilton, 2021). In targeting the Alberta pension fund co-owning their buildings, tenants built coalitions with unions whose members’ pensions were invested in the fund. After investigating the ownership structure behind the management of the property, rent strike organisers then ‘adopted a multi-pronged strategy of simultaneously creating negative publicity for AIMCo [pension fund] while building solidarity with public sector workers in Alberta’ (Shilton, 2021: 18). By linking the politics of rent to questions of pension ethics and public welfare, activists generated new forms of class solidarity.

Expressions of direct conflict, such as anti-eviction blockades and rent strikes, are underpinned by the forms of tenant organisation and power-building developed against GCLs, often mirroring their scale and structure. Multiple contributions in the special issue mobilise the notion of the ‘upward scale shift’ (Tilly and Tarrow, 2007) to conceptualise the ways in which ‘tenant contention has moved beyond the building level’, as Bonshoms-Guzman (2025a) puts it, or ‘transcend the hyper-local level’, in the words of Vollmer (2025). The vast portfolios held by GCLs implies that a relatively large number of tenants are exposed to similar landlord ‘valorisation strategies’ (Vollmer, 2025), creating opportunities for broader organisation and action. In this sense, the move from multibuilding organising to multibuilding strikes is an example of a move from building to operationalising collective power against GCLs (Gustavussen, 2025). In the case of the majority-tenant city of Berlin, the shared grievances and conflictivity provoked by GCLs catalysed a city-wide campaign demanding wholesale expropriation and socialisation of their properties (Vollmer, 2025). The broader set of actors that become entangled into the operation of GCLs, such as pensioners (Shilton, 2021) and asylum seekers (Santamarina and Karaliotas, 2025), also broadens the potential alliances that tenant movements can cultivate to expand their scale and scope. Finally, the transnational character of GCLs has also been mirrored by emerging forms of transnational coordination and knowledge exchange between tenant organisations (Ill-Raga, 2025).

While radical protest repertoires have played an important role in contesting GCLs, they are often complemented – or at times supplanted – by more institutionalised forms of resistance such as legal action, reputational campaigns and direct negotiation with landlords, authorities, and third parties (Martínez and Gil, 2024; Polanska, 2023). These negotiations sometimes involve tenant organisations proposing and even co-drafting new legal regulations, often working with legal teams, political parties and policy-makers, as has occurred in Catalonia and Berlin (D’Adda and Kusiak, 2025; Gil and Palomera, 2024; Martínez, 2019). These negotiations, however, are far from neutral arenas of dialogue; they unfold within asymmetrical power structures. As Bonshoms-Guzman (2025a) underscores, building bargaining power remains a prerequisite for such negotiations. This requires sustained tenant organising at both the building and portfolio levels, combining grassroots organising with visible public campaigns. In this context, forms of spatial appropriation – such as in-building assemblies and solidarity actions – become essential tools of resistance and empowerment. In this process tenants face not only legal and political hurdles but also active repression. GCLs frequently introduce countermeasures such as surveillance, security personnel and legal threats to deter organising, as seen in the Hamilton rent strike case in Ontario (Risager, 2021). Simultaneously, state authorities may respond to mobilisation with threats or acts of repression, which co-shape the contours of negotiation. This is the thorny terrain that tenant movements navigate between confrontation and institutionalisation.

Legal and policy change: From post-neoliberalisation to socialisation?

New demands for legal and policy change have emerged from the cycle of tenant contention sparked by GCLs. These demands have addressed both the aggressive property management strategies characteristic of GCLs and the growing concentration of private power in their hands. In this ‘legal countermovement’ (Ill-Raga, 2024), tenant organisations have promoted new legislation while also creatively utilising existing legal frameworks (D’Adda and Kusiak, 2025). Policy shifts have pivoted from more defensive to more offensive positions and from a more particularistic to a more universalistic scope (Card, 2024; Gil and Palomera, 2024). These changes can be situated within broader moves away from market logics in the private rental sector in various locations, which have been conceptualised as processes of ‘post-neoliberalisation’ (Byrne, 2022; Hochstenbach, 2023; Kadi et al., 2021; Vidal et al., 2024). Some measures have gone further, taking steps in the direction of expropriation and socialisation. The concentration of property in corporations has also set it up as a target for demands to reclaim collective ownership. Overall, the legal and policy landscape in which GCLs operate is beginning to shift.

A first set of legal and policy changes has targeted many of the specific ‘valorisation strategies’ (Vollmer, 2025) of GCLs, particularly their short-termist investment dynamics. Denmark’s 2020 ‘Blackstone intervention’, for example, targeted Blackstone’s opportunistic ‘buy it, fix it, sell it’ model by introducing a five-year waiting period before rents could be increased following property acquisition and renovation (Christophers, 2021b). This waiting period does not apply, however, if a property’s energy efficiency levels are increased by certain thresholds. In Spain, the duration of leases was extended from 3 to 7 years for corporate landlords in 2019. This similarly has put obstacles in the way of rapid speculative operations (Bonshoms-Guzman, 2025a). However, such delays do not seem to be long enough to completely close the door to valorisation strategies based on speculative buy-and-sell cycles.

Another line of legal and policy intervention has aimed at the means employed by GCLs to displace tenants who stand in the way of closing ‘rent gaps’, including neglect of maintenance, harassment and evictions. Gustavussen (2025) examines the Tenant Anti-Harassment Ordinance (TAHO), passed in Los Angeles in 2021, and Tenant-Right-to-Organize Ordinance – colloquially known as ‘Union at Home’ – passed in San Francisco in 2022 (see also, Gustavussen, 2024b). TAHO prohibits landlords from harassing tenants and punishes violations with fines or prison time. Harassment is defined broadly, including withholding services or maintenance, imposing illegal rent increases, coercing tenants to vacate through cash-for-keys or retaliating against tenant organising. The latter centres on ‘Union at Home’, a Tenant-Right-to-Organize ordinance which gives the right to form a tenant’s association and file for rent reductions with an independent Rent Board if the landlord fails to provide the necessary ‘housing services’. The effectiveness of these types of measures, however, is particularly dependent on their small print and enforcement.

One of the most notable policy shifts in recent years has been the return of rent price controls. After decades of tenancy deregulation and the consolidation of a neoliberal consensus against public price regulation, several countries – including Spain, Ireland, France and Germany – have introduced new rent restrictions. Most target price increases between tenancies, thereby complicating GCLs’ ability to close ‘rent gaps’ through steep rent hikes. Yet many of these controls have been implemented in contexts where rents are already unaffordably high. In Spain, for instance, the Right to Housing Law mandates that ‘large landlords’ reduce rents in ‘stressed rental zones’ to conform to a price index. However, the index itself reflects the average market rents of an area. In Catalonia, the only region where these controls have been activated, tenant demands have therefore shifted from preventing increases to actively reducing rents.

The visibility of GCLs due to their size and practices has also led to legal differentiation among landlords in terms of rights and responsibilities. Recent Catalan and Spanish legislation, emerging from popular initiatives and pandemic emergency responses, has imposed new social obligations on ‘large landlords’ (those owning more than 10 properties), such as providing rent relief for low-income tenants and regularising socially vulnerable squatters. These measures aim to make the private sector ‘co-responsible’ for addressing the housing crisis (D’Adda and Kusiak, 2025). They can be understood as a form of ‘housing rationing’, a redistribution measure forced upon large landlords (Vidal et al., 2024). These types of measures suggest that the private concentration of ownership over key resources cannot ignore its social functions. They are also underpinned by an understanding that corporate property is a different phenomenon from classically understood liberal private property, in that the former is fully detached from personal use and responsibility (Kusiak, 2024).

The concentration of property under corporate ownership has also created the conditions of possibility for new socialisation claims. The consolidation of previously fragmented ownership structures lays the foundation for a collective take over, whilst the rogue landlord practices endemic to GCLs contribute to the social legitimacy of such claims. The Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (DWE) campaign and the successful 2021 referendum in Berlin exemplify this shift. As Vollmer (2025: 3198) argues, ‘the emergence of GCLs in the form of super-landlords and the roll-out of similar valorization strategies on a grand scale provided momentum to Berlin’s tenant movement’, and helped unite ‘disparate ideas and claims for an alternative housing provision into a coherent vision’ (Vollmer, 2025: 3189). The campaign invoked Article 15 of the German constitution to call for the socialisation of corporate-owned housing and its transfer to a new, non-profit public agency governed democratically by tenants. As D’Adda and Kusiak (2025: 3215) argue, ‘this marked a radical departure from previous campaigns: rather than attempting to regulate rents within the existing market structure, DWE’s goal was to transform the very foundations of housing as a commodity, turning it into a public good managed democratically’. Similar campaigns for (re)municipalisation and nationalisation have also taken place in other locations, including Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, and the United States (Gustavussen, 2024a).

Many of the legislative advances outlined above have encountered strong legal challenges and reversals, particularly at the institutional levels that are furthest removed from tenant’s urban power base. Berlin’s 2020 rent cap, for example, was lifted only a year after its introduction, as Germany’s constitutional court ruled that the city-state had no jurisdiction in the matter. Paris also saw its rent controls annulled by the tribunals and only managed to get them reintroduced with the passing of a new national law. A similar pattern around competencies was repeated with rent controls in Catalonia. As such, tenant advances in the institutional arena are entangled in a politics of scale (Vidal, 2021). Some measures have also faced constitutionality challenges as they push up against the limits of private property rights in liberal regimes. In this sense, many ‘housing rationing’ measures in Catalonia have been annulled, whereas the socialisation measure in Berlin was stalled in the hands of an ‘expert commission to explore its legal possibilities’ (D’Adda and Kusiak, 2025). In these cases, a politics underlying the interpretation of the law is also at play (D’Adda and Kusiak, 2025, see also Vidal et al., 2024).

Even when legislation is passed, enforcement remains a persistent challenge. As noted, GCLs possess the legal and financial resources to exploit loopholes and manipulate regulatory benchmarks. Public authorities, meanwhile, often lack the capacity or political will to act decisively. D’Adda and Kusiak (2025) situate this problem within the broader retreat of states from managing housing markets, leaving them in the hands of private actors. Gustavussen (2025) points to current financialised modes of governance, in which the state’s ‘primary constituency’, the citizenry, has been displaced by a ‘secondary constituency’, financial markets and institutions. With reference to the case of ‘Union at Home’, she argues that having enforcement mechanisms that do not exclusively rely on state action is key. Weak state enforcement, on the other hand, can provide tenant unions with an opening to assert themselves as essential actors in defending tenant rights.

Ultimately, the balance between direct action, political agitation, and legal strategy is a delicate one for tenant movements. In some contexts, legal tools can enhance tenant power and strengthen union capacity; in others, they risk narrowing the scope of action or generating impotence and exhaustion. D’Adda and Kusiak (2025) suggest a ‘multidimensional legal strategy’ that enables the development of new narratives and counter-hegemonic proposals, while fostering mutually reinforcing combinations of legal and extra-legal tactics. This requires an ‘ecology of movements and organisations’ (Vollmer and Gutiérrez, 2022), including tenant unions, political organisations, social spaces, legal teams and think tanks and a broad repertoire of collective actions. In any case, as Gustavussen (2025) cautions, given the deepening entanglements between the state and financial actors, tenants must rely on their own collective power above all to transform housing conditions.

Structure of the special issue

The articles in this special issue provide a contextualisation of the emergence of GCLs and analyse the practices and strategies deployed by tenant movements and organisations in the current cycle of contention. While the first three articles concentrate on the practices of tenants in confronting GCLs – highlighting their main protest repertoires and forms of organisation – the final two shift focus to the imaginaries and institutional proposals advanced by these movements, and the struggles to reflect them in legal and policy frameworks.

Gustavussen’s and Bonshoms-Guzmán’s articles each give particular attention to the practice of multi-building organising enabled by the property structures ushered in by GCLs in two key contexts, California and Catalonia. Santamarina and Karaliotas, in turn, examine the emergence of new relational networks formed both through and in opposition to the structures and practices of GCLs. Their article analyses how local tenants and asylum seekers in Glasgow converged within the ‘No Evictions Network’, forged through shared experiences of displacement.

The following article by Vollmer investigates how tenant struggles in Berlin produced a compelling vision for an alternative system of housing provision – affordable, decommodified, democratic and environmentally just. This vision underpinned the campaign to expropriate and socialise large corporate landlords, which achieved majority support in the 2021 Berlin referendum. The final research article, by D’Adda and Kusiak, offers a comparative perspective on the legal strategies developed by housing movements in Barcelona and Berlin in response to the growing influence of corporate landlords. They show how legal action must be combined with political mobilisation to navigate an uneven institutional landscape.

In addition to the research articles, the special issue includes three commentaries that reflect on some of the geographical dimensions of global corporate landlordism. Ill-Raga focuses on tenant internationalism, characterising the new generation of tenant unions that has emerged in this cycle of contention and their initial efforts to build networks across borders that mirror those of GCLs. Vidal highlights the enduring relevance of the neighbourhood as a site for tenant organising and resistance to displacement pressures and evictions driven by GCLs. Finally, Socoloff critically reflects on the limited presence of GCLs in Latin America. In doing so, the commentary draws attention to the ‘Global North’ bias that persists in both this special issue and the broader literature on the topic, and points to the need for further research in underexamined geographies. The special issue thus closes by underscoring the importance of broadening the geographic scope of research on GCLs and tenant struggles beyond the contexts that have so far dominated scholarly attention.