Housing precarity and the PRS
The Week in Housing 06/05/22
The Focus Ireland Lunch Time Talks series on April 20th featured Richard Waldron of Queens University, presenting his work on generation rent and precarity (watch the recording here). I was asked to act as respondent and today’s newsletter is a summary of what I said. The research Richard presented has been published here, here and here. In my response, I focused not so much on the findings (which are very important in their own right), but on what I thought was most valuable and thought provoking about Waldron’s approach, especially in relation to housing inequality and the PRS.
Two principal contributions jumped out at me from this fascinating research. The first relates to the importance of qualitative research on housing inequalities; the second relates to the conceptual value of ‘precarity’ as a way of thinking about housing inequality and the PRS. In what follows I will look at each issue in turn.
Richard’s research is one of the few pieces of qualitative research that looks at the experiences of renters in Ireland. Despite the fact that issues around the PRS have been high on the political and policy agenda for many years, and the well-known role of the PRS in the homelessness crisis, we still have relatively little qualitative data that looks at the PRS at the level of subjective experience.
If we look at issues around housing inequality in the PRS in the Irish context, for example, we might start by looking at work on affordability, for example the ESRI’s 2019 publication on housing affordability or some of the work of the Nevin Institute. In both case, the focus is on the proportion of income or wages spent on housing costs, and both find that affordability issues are most acute in the PRS. This approach has also dominated the media debate, which has focused on headline rents as the main story in the PRS. Approaches which focus on measuring affordability are of course extremely important, but they are also perhaps too narrow to fully capture housing inequality as it relates to the PRS. Last year’s report on Housing Adequacy from IHREC and ESRI took a broader approach, by bringing in issues like insecurity, quality of dwellings, overcrowding etc. It also looked at differences across groups, such as lone parents and migrants (I wrote about the report in a previous issue). But this report also draws primarily on official data sources such as the CSO and EUSILC. While again of huge value, I think this kind of data misses something that Waldron’s qualitative approach brings to our understanding of the politics of the PRS.
The qualitative approach brings insight into the subjective, the affective and even the embodied experience of living in the PRS. From this a number of important insights about housing inequality arise. First, the main features of the Irish PRS generate structural insecurity, or what Waldron calls precarity, for tenants. This insecurity is experienced in the form of fear, anxiety, feelings of lack of control and shame. Second, this approach captures how different dimensions of the PRS interact at the level of experience - for example the experience of searching for a place to live interacts with tenants’ relationship with their landlord, which in turn shapes how they relate to their home etc. This shows us that issues like affordability and insecurity of tenure should not be thought of as separate policy domains, but rather as a single nexus of experiences that shape outcomes for tenants. Third, a qualitative perspective brings into focus social relationships, specifically in this case the landlord-tenant relationship, which is something I have written about in the past, which emerges as an important determinant of tenants’ access to, and experience of, housing.
Turning to the second major contribution I would like to touch on, the concept of precarity is really worth thinking about as it tries to move beyond simply describing or measuring housing inequality, to conceptualising it. The concept of precarity is valuable for a number of reasons:
1) It emphasises that insecurity and risk are fundamental to the contemporary politics of housing;
2) It emphasises the subjective/affective dimension of this, as mentioned above;
3) It emphasis the interaction of multiple economic domains, most importantly housing and the labour market.
To think a bit more about the concept of precarity, it is interesting to compare it to the dominant way of thinking about insecurity in the PRS within the housing studies literature, which is the concept of ‘secure occupancy’. Hulse and Milligan developed this notion in a 2014 paper to move beyond the limitations of the concept of ‘security of tenure’. While security of tenure is mainly about legislative and legal arrangements in the PRS, the concept of secure occupancy looks at how the experience of insecurity is shaped by markets, by legislation and policy and by culture.
Precarity and secure occupancy have much in common. Both emphasise that insecurity is both structural and experiential, and both emphasise the fact that it is generated via the intersection of different domains. But there are some differences too. Precarity is a concept that comes more from the political economy literature, while secure occupancy has its roots in philosophical notions of ontological security and the housing and wellbeing literature.
I think that the specific value of precarity, however, lies in the fact that it focuses on what Waldron describes as the privatisation of risk. The concept of precarity situates housing insecurity as part of a wider process of political economic change, essentially of neoliberalism, whereby risk is transferred from the state to the individual. In this sense, precarity puts housing insecurity into a political economic context, in a way that ‘secure occupancy’ does not. Relatedly, this allows us to see two important things about housing insecurity.
The first is the point Mathew Desmond makes in his 2016 book Evicted: housing insecurity, specifically in the PRS, is an increasingly characteristic feature of poverty, or perhaps class, today. Is this the case in Ireland? I think it is something well worth thinking about and researching further.
The second, and related, point is that through the lens of precarity we can think about the politics of housing insecurity in the PRS and how they relate to wider political issues, especially class conflict and electoral change. The link between housing inequality and populism is something Waldron has written about elsewhere, and the relationship between generation rent and electoral change is something which has been much discussed in relation to the rise of Sinn Féin. Nevertheless, we are still only scratching the surface of understanding the political ramifications of declining homeownership.
The only criticism, or concern, I have with the concept of precarity is its focus on risk, and this idea of the transfer of risk from the collective/state to the individual. With something like social insurance, this way of thinking about it makes a lot of sense. If social insurance protections are weakened, this can be thought about as a straightforward transfer of risk from the state to the individual, because social insurance is primarily focused on risk.
However, in the case of housing, I wonder if what has changed is something more closely related to what we might call ‘stability over time’, a degree of certainty around the future. Stable housing, which only emerged in the post-war era, lest we forget, was essential to the formation of middle class and working class identities. The stability of home over time made possible a certain way of thinking about life, of planning for the future, of imagining retirement, etc. Precarity in the PRS seems to me to be primarily about the evaporation of this stability and the way of thinking about and relating to the future associated with it. Renters live in a perpetual present, and anyone who has done qualitative research with renters will tell you the phrases one most frequently hears are about a lack of hope and a sense of being trapped. This is very closely related to the idea of risk, but perhaps not entirely the same.
Events
You can now watch the latest #SimonTalks seminar with Lorcan Sirr, looking at housing and data. The Housing Commission are putting on what I believe is their first public event next week, a conference on the right to housing. Register here.
What I’m reading
Jules Birch, Inside Housing columnist, has launched a newsletter called The Housing Question. Focus Ireland have published a great new research resource which provides guidance on peer research in housing and homelessness. This podcast from the #Housing2030 team is well worth a listen, looking at Central Banks, monetary policy and housing. And finally two new really interesting pieces of research. The first looks at the comparative political economy of housing construction, and the second at the impact of declining homeownership on economic inequality.