Young men present an interesting framework for integration policy. They should be the refugees with the most hope in front of them. They have adaptability, mobility and intelligence. Yet, this chapter will outline how the narrow framework of the integration regime structurally limits the effectiveness of these ‘benefits’. Through ethnographic fieldwork with primarily young men who arrived first in Germany alone, I will reflect their experiences through the various challenges presented by the integration regime.

The regional integration concept

Like many German cities, Kommunen and Lander, the medium-sized, western German city of Saarbrucken prioritized integration around 2003 following national legislation that adopted integration as the primary concept for the future of migration law, which was part of a broader shift in political thought, academic debate and the social imaginary (Schinkel 2017). Although there were extensive legal changes that developed after the enactment of the Integration Law in 2015 (Integrationsgesetz) (Ersanilli and Koopmans 2010; Bundesregierung 2016), it was merely the final touch of a legal framework that evolved from the early calls for immigration and citizenship reform in 2000 until the implementation of the 2005 Immigrant Law (Zuwanderungsgesetz) (Schneider 2007). From this point onwards, discussion of migration in Germany occurred primarily in the context of integration. From the national focus on integration, many regional governments took it upon themselves to organize and define a regional integration concept. This chapter begins with that idealist perspective and applies the ethnographic empirical research to analyse how everything played out when the regions were confronted with large numbers of asylum applications.

The framework outlined by Saarbrucken's Immigration and Integration Office (ZIB) in its reports between 2008 and 2014 largely highlights the collaborative efforts between interested parties: the city working with local arms of aid organizations like the German Red Cross (Deutsches Rotes Kreuz) and Caritas, and a broader network of organizations to assist with the integration of migrants into the community (Zuwanderungs-und Integrationsburo (ZIB) 2014). To put the impact of a European aid agency like the Catholic Church associated with Caritas into perspective, they alone have over 25,000 branches across Germany. However, the report also envisions a concept of integration that requires broader community engagement by the citizenry with foreigners to achieve its aims.

Between past and future

Hannah Arendt, the scholar who made public action the heart of her reflection, directly references temporality to denounce the crisis wrought by mass society on the construction of being-with-others within the public space and, therefore, of political action in general. More specifically, Arendt evidenced the unbridgeable discontinuity between past and future produced by the demise of tradition – which is understood as a tradition of ‘opening up to the world along with others’.

Published in the US at the beginning of the 1960s, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Arendt, 1961) collects reflections elaborated between the mid-1950s and the early 1960s. The book openly expresses Arendt’s acute discomfort regarding her present, marred by the loss of the collective memory of the struggle for liberation from Nazism. With the fracture in memory, not only does the past fade into uncertainty but the present also ends up lost in the crisis. Lacking resonance, past and future drag the new generations towards a meaningless horizon.

Chapter One ended, significantly, with a reference to the legacies – good or bad – left by each generation to the next. These legacies are shaped by memory and can be infused with energy and transformation potential by expectations of the future. Chapter Three will focus on generations as a critical junction of the materialization of time, sitting at the centre of the transition between past and future.

This transition is at the heart of Arendt’s book. In fact, the preface to the book is titled ‘The Gap between Past and Future’ and opens with a metaphor quoted from French poet René Char, who was part of the French Resistance movement. Proposed by Char in the last year of the Resistance, between 1943 and 1944, the quote reads: ‘Notre héritage n’est précedé d’aucun testament’ (‘Our inheritance was left to us by no testament’) (Arendt, 1961: 4). According to Arendt, this metaphor is meant to convey the difficult relationship between past and future when the inheritance received is not legitimized by any tradition (the testament). A testament, as we know, connects the past and future together through an act of will, thus granting the continuity between what was and what will be for what concerns the use of certain assets.

Memento

As teachers, we often discuss the topic of memory with our students, and sometimes they protest: ‘Why do we have to talk about the past? It’s the future we care about!’ But are they really two separate things? During a lecture, we were once rescued by a story told by a friend of ours. It is a story taken from daily life.

Our friend lives in Rome, a crowded city. Every night, when he drives home, he has to circle his neighbourhood many times to find a parking spot. He is rather forgetful, and he knows that. Finding his car the next morning is often a problem. The solution he has found is that every night, when he gets home, he tells his wife where he parked: “Saying it out loud is really helpful, you know”, he said, “Then we both know where the car is.”

In this story, especially in our friend’s comment, there is something that is relevant to our discussion of memory, which is that memory has a power to ‘exteriorize’ itself. Saying out loud to another person where we parked the car is a form of exteriorization of personal memory, that is, of the human capacity to store a memory outside of ourselves. We might as well say that memory has a power to ‘objectivize’ itself: if our friend was more familiar with his smartphone, he could save the spot in a note or take a picture of the street, or he might, more simply, write it on a piece of paper.

This is the method used by the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s (2000) film Memento to exteriorize his memory. This character suffers from anterograde amnesia, a disorder that makes him able to retain whatever happens to him only for a few minutes before it fades away. His life is a series of unrelated episodes with no memory to tie them together – which clearly makes it a very hard life. We might take this disorder as a metaphor of modern life, that is, of the disconnected character of our experiences in the frantic rhythm of the daily grind.

This book was written, and published, at a very delicate stage in world history: in the wake of the COVID-19 emergency, which has revealed the vulnerability of all human societies when affected by viruses that know no boundaries; when war has returned to the heart of Europe, putting the global economy and world order under strain; and while facing the prospect of a worsening environmental crisis. Given the uncertainty of the global and local contexts, some focus their expectations and goals on the present. A kind of ‘carpe diem’ attitude seems to resurface, over and over again: from Horace via Lorenzo the Magnificent to Dead Poet’s Society, that is, almost to the present day. Acceleration, one of the leitmotifs that run throughout all the analyses presented here, has probably contributed to accentuating this syndrome of presentism that seems to crush the past and narrow down our vision of the future.

However, as we have seen in the previous chapters, presentism is not the only key to understanding the spirit of our times, nor is it the most important one. Memory and the past do not vanish, regardless of whether one seeks to nostalgically propose them again in a future moment or draw on them to build this future. There is no future without a past, and there is no past if we ignore where we come from, where we are at present, and where we want to go. However, there is something new in the times we inhabit that was not present in past eras.

Over the past two centuries, palaeontologists have collected, classified, and catalogued fossil specimens to understand the succession of plant and animal life forms on Earth, a process that took millions of years. It is estimated that the species to which the human beings now living on Earth belong appeared relatively recently: about two hundred thousand years ago. Many species have disappeared or become extinct, either because they were defeated in the struggle for survival by more adapted species or as a result of exogenous changes in environmental conditions. Although these facts can be found in books and we may even have studied them at school, they have only recently entered the collective consciousness of at least a part of humanity. Like many other species, the human species may one day become extinct; its presence on the planet is therefore only temporary.

Living in different times

Human societies are not static entities that can be studied and analysed outside of time. They can be likened to a train, where at every moment, someone is getting on (newborns and immigrants) while someone else is getting off (the dying and emigrants). How do memory and future interrelate for those who get on and off the train? Where is the train coming from, and where is it headed? Societies must be understood as an entity whose composition is constantly renewing through the succession of generations. What is true of every society is equally, and even more, true of the human population that inhabits the planet like a ship traveling through space.

The concept of generation is widespread. In everyday language, it has a plurality of meanings. It has a bio-anthropological connotation, as ‘generativity’ (indicating the links of the chain connecting parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren), but it also denotes the fact that being born in a certain period and having lived the crucial years of formation in a certain cultural climate shaped by certain historical events leaves a mark on the way individuals feel, think and act. The fact of belonging to a particular ‘time’ unites the members of a generation, distinguishing them from previous and subsequent generations.

Both these common notions do not deviate much from the use of the concept in historical and social sciences, where it is frequently employed in two different realms. First, in a demographic sense, we speck of ‘age cohorts’ to identify the ensemble of those who were born in a particular time period (usually a year). We also refer to ‘age cohorts’ to denote those who enter school or the military (in those countries that still mandate military service), or even new electors crossing the age threshold at which they acquire the right to vote. Second, in a historical/ sociological sense, the word ‘generation’ identifies the ensemble of those who experienced certain events or historical phases at certain stages of their lives.

A society with many elders and few young people

Let us start with the demographic sense involving the distribution of population in age classes, which sets the framework for a few fundamental dynamics in the relationship between generations. We will consider two groups: people aged 0 to 19 (children, teenagers, and youths) and people over 60 years of age.

The key idea behind this book can be summarized as follows: the study of temporal perspectives and the changes brought about by historical processes can help the social sciences recompose what other disciplines have gradually separated and fragmented, and oftentimes contrasted. In a global society full of conflicts that have only been partially analysed, we need a global approach. A temporal analysis can both sustain this approach and concretely express it. Using time as an analytic tool, the defence of life in the Anthropocene and the fight against unacceptable levels of economic and social inequality – not only between the Global North and South but also within individual societies – can become part of the same global justice project.

In this framework, we first need to identify the signals coming from free civil society and amplify its call for a radical change of direction. Depending on the possibilities available to us today, we must redefine our horizons with regard to both the climate crisis and the ‘reasonable utopias’ that promote respect for the moral ideal of equality. We can therefore affirm that while focusing on a redefinition of the concepts of memory and future in the first decades of the new century, and exploring how the very concept of generation has been transformed in this context, this book advances a distinctly political perspective.

The book’s title refers to the theme of temporal horizons (Husserl, 1964 [1928]), which, for many decades, have been affected by a process of contraction or shrinkage that has challenged some of the axioms of modernity (Di Chio, 2015). This choice was the result of a precise analytical itinerary. Given the effect of the ‘closure of time’ on the present, which damages its essential relationship with the past and the medium-to long-term future, this process impacts the very life of institutions and social groups, as well as the lives of single individuals. The forms and exercise of democracy, collective action, symbolic and communicative expressions, biographical constructions and identities, social reproduction and conflict, the relationships among generations, and even – and most importantly – the concept of action itself are profoundly changed by this deep transformation.

This book has explored trends in private rental housing in the advanced economies over the past two decades. On the demand side, these trajectories include growth in private renting and more families, couples and higherincome households living in the private rented sector (PRS). On the supply side, developments include the increasing numbers of private individual landlords and the growing importance of various types of large-scale corporate landlords. Internet-based PropTech platforms have become increasingly important in the process of matching tenants and landlords. And the emergence and rapid growth of Airbnb, and other internet-based nightly accommodation hosts, has impacted upon housing supply, prices and rents in popular tourist localities. Taken together, these developments represent a significant, and to some extent, unexpected, change in the nature and role of private rental housing in the first two decades of the 21st century. It is not a wholesale transformation of the sector but rather, to a greater or less extent, a ‘recalibration’ of private renting and its contribution to housing provision in the advanced economies.

The contributions to this book highlight the pivotal impact that the global financial crisis (GFC) has had on recent trajectories of change in private renting. It was the largest economic shock to hit the advanced economies (AEs) since the Great Depression in the interwar years. The subprime mortgage crisis was an important catalyst behind the onset of the GFC and the accompanying fall in house prices in many AEs. It also prompted central banks to introduce macroprudential controls on mortgage lending to households and buy-to-let (BTL) landlords. In the aftermath of the GFC, interest rates declined to historically unprecedented low levels, as central banks cut their policy rates and introduced quantitative easing. One consequence of this new era of cheap money was to decrease bond yields and increase house prices (Mian and Sufi, 2014; Tooze, 2018).

Viewed from an historical institutionalist perspective, the GFC created a ‘critical juncture’ (Pierson, 2004) that helped to shift private renting and owner occupation onto altered trajectories – ‘developmental paths’ – involving variable degrees of re-growth of the former and decline of the latter across many of the AEs.

Introduction

An important feature of the Australian housing system in the 2000s has been the sustained growth of private renting. This development denotes a change in what has long been characterised as a classic homeownership society. In the decades after the Second World War, private renting declined as homeownership increased to the early 1970s, followed by a period of relative stability in the housing system until the 1990s. From that time, private renting began to increase again as homeownership rates fell modestly (Burke et al, 2014). In the 2000s the private rental sector began to grow more strongly, with changes in the profile of tenants, landlord investment and more professional management of properties.

Definitions of private renting vary between countries (Haffner et al, 2010). In Australia, private renting refers to households who live in private properties who pay rent to either a real estate agent or a private landlord who does not live with the tenant. This definition excludes households paying rent to residential park operators and employers (government and other) and social landlords (public and not-for-profit landlords). Rents are set according to the market and vary between accommodation types/ sizes and by area and lettings are based on ability to pay market rent not administrative criteria. Private rental housing is not a distinct stock that has been purpose built and managed for rental; properties move between ownership and private rental, either on sale or simply change of use (Hulse and Yates, 2017). For this reason, rented accommodation is not usually let furnished nor do rents usually include utility costs as is the case in some other countries. There are other rental niches with purpose-built accommodation which are let to specific groups, often furnished, and including utilities, including short-term lets like Airbnb, rooming houses and purpose-built student accommodation (Pawson et al, 2020: 181). This chapter examines growth and change in the private rental sector in the 2000s.

Changes in the size and role of the Australian private rental sector

More than a quarter of all Australian households rent privately, up from just over one in five at the start of the 21st century.

Introduction

The Spanish housing system historically has been characterised by an imbalance in tenure in favour of homeownership and a social housing stock that is either residual or completely neglected. Since the mid-20th century, housing policies have not been impartial regarding this situation. In fact, housing provision in Spain has focused greatly on the homeownership sector, reducing social housing stock over time, and granting the private rented sector (PRS) the benefit of several regulations that have failed to change its downward course.

Analysis of the PRS in Spain cannot be decontextualised from the characteristics of the Spanish housing system at large. The Spanish PRS has often performed the role of social housing during booms in the housing market, as low-income households could not afford to enter any other form of tenure (Pareja-Eastaway, 2010; Pareja-Eastaway and Sánchez Martínez, 2016; López-Rodríguez and Matea l, 2019). Thus, rather than fulfilling the well-known theoretical functions of the PRS throughout the typical housing career (that is, first housing access or increasing socioeconomic mobility), in Spain, the PRS has partially solved the issue of housing access for disadvantaged groups. However, the rise in demand without a proper response from the supply side has contributed to a generalised increase in rents, which has also been aggravated in recent years by the popularity of temporary subletting for tourist purposes.

The narrow PRS is one factor that has partially prevented Spain from engaging in resilient reactions to the economic and financial crisis of 2008 and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, both of which have created an unstable framework for employment and economic growth and have had a negative impact on housing affordability. Since access to homeownership has been removed from the equation during these crises – due to the tightening of credit conditions for obtaining a mortgage and the sector’s bad reputation stemming from the increase in evictions carried out, among other issues – the growing pressure to find affordable housing is central to the Spanish housing debate (Pareja-Eastaway and Sánchez Martínez, 2016; López-Rodríguez and Matea, 2019). The historical trajectory of the Spanish housing system has currently left the authorities with fewer alternatives than in the past to grant adequate housing access, placing the PRS squarely in the spotlight of housing policy design.

Introduction

The Irish housing system has undergone tremendous change over recent decades. In addition to the turmoil of the property boom and bust associated with the global financial crisis (GFC), it has also witnessed a long-term decline of homeownership and social housing, a growing share of households in private rental accommodation, almost a decade of record rent inflation, and a chronic homelessness crisis. Indeed, for many years now housing has rarely been absent from the newspaper headlines and was among the most important issues for voters in the most recent general election. For most of the 20th century housing outcomes improved steadily. In the 21st century this trend appears to have been reversed.

These changes can be conceptualised in terms of the transition from a ‘homeownership society’ to a ‘post-homeownership society’ (see Ronald and Kadi, 2017). For most of the post-war era, Ireland was a quintessential homeownership society, reaching some of the highest rates of homeownership in Europe. Homeownership was engrained, not just in housing policy, but also politically and culturally. Homeownership supports throughout this period acted as a social leveller by facilitating access to affordable and secure housing for a wide spectrum of households, including the working class. Because of the central role of the state in housing, Norris (2016) has characterised Ireland during this period as a ‘property-based welfare state’.

The transition to a post-homeownership society, characterised by the growth of the private rental sector (PRS), has, in contrast, transformed the housing system into a key driver of inequality for an increasing number of households. Homeownership continues to be the dominant tenure, and roughly half of all homeowners are mortgage-free. Most commentators would agree that homeownership is also the most culturally dominant tenure. According to survey data, for example, the overwhelming majority of PRS tenants continue to aspire to homeownership (Corrigan et al, 2019). The term ‘post-homeownership’, then, should not be taken to mean that homeownership no longer plays a central role within the housing system. Instead, it refers to the erosion of the structures which generated majority homeownership, and consequently the growing difficulty faced by households in accessing homeownership and the related prevalence of the PRS (Ronald and Kadi, 2017; see also Forrest and Hirayama, 2015).

Introduction

In contrast to most other advanced economies, where private renting is more or less a residual sector focused on the poor and those unable to buy their home, the German private rental sector is still a cornerstone of housing provision and serves a broad range of households. As in many other countries, though, individual private landlords dominate in the German private rental sector (PRS). There is no doubt that the PRS is a key pillar of the German housing system. In summary, this system is characterised by:

• 1. strong tenancy security for decades, interrupted only by deregulation legislation in the 1960s;

• 2. a system of only temporary subsidies for social housing at moderate profits, which has led to a permanent shrinking of the social housing stock;

• 3. building up of a large rental housing stock via extensive and continuous housing subsidies and generous tax treatment in the past (1949–2005);

• 4. Stop-go housing subsidies since 2006 while maintaining relative tenure neutrality.

In the German case, the author prefers to define the PRS according to ownership. A rental dwelling thus belongs to the PRS if it is owned by a private person, a group of private persons or by a private company. For pragmatic reasons, this definition includes social housing owned by private landlords because only the owner groups, but not the status of the apartments in their respective housing portfolio, is statistically recorded. But this does not affect more than 2 per cent of the sector’s housing stock.

Structure of supply and demand in the private rental housing market

The German housing market is characterised by specific structures that distinguish it very clearly from other housing markets. The essential aspect here is the role of renting and particularly private renting. It is quantitatively and qualitatively quite different from the private rental market in other early industrialised Western countries, where homeownership is more widespread.

Supply side: a very large cottage industry

The most striking characteristic of the German private rental sector from a comparative perspective is its size: almost 80 per cent per cent of the rental market and more than 45 per cent of the total housing market.

Introduction

When private renting reached an all-time low of about 10 per cent of the housing stock in 2009, the Netherlands became one of the countries in Europe with the smallest private rental sector (PRS) (Haffner, 2014; 2018; Haffner et al, 2018). Private renting had decreased from a share of 60 per cent of the stock since the Second World War. This decline could not be called a surprise after decades of subsidising homeownership and social renting, while rents were controlled.

More recently, a turnaround took place with an increase of private rental stock. The most recent data series available in Figure 6.1 shows that in the period 2012–2021, the total occupied dwelling stock increased with a little over 640,000 units to more than 7.6 million units, spread over the three main owners. The increases of the different tenures effected a largely stable tenure distribution in the period 2012–2021: homeowners’ market share remained at 58 per cent, while housing corporations – the social landlords – lost two percentage points of their share, ending up with a little over 29 per cent of occupied stock. Other landlords than social landlords (private landlords) gained three percentage points of market share (almost 240,000 dwellings), amounting to almost 13 per cent of occupied stock in 2021, slightly under one million occupied dwellings. Historically, this private rental stock has been in the hands of non-organisation or so-called individual or person landlords (individuals and couples) and organisations (institutional investors and other organisations) (Priemus, 1998; Haffner, 2014). The latter landlords were more likely to own the newer and higher-rent dwellings, while the former were more likely to target the lower end of the market. Whether rental dwellings are managed by estate agents depends on the choice of the investor/ landlord (Haffner, 2014).

This chapter analyses the extent to which this turnaround from decline to rise shows structural dimensions and explores whether private renting is likely to continue to grow. This topic seems justified based on knowledge about such a trend in other countries.